That sinuous southern life, that oblique and slow and complicated old beauty, that warm thick air and blood warm sea, that place of mists and languor and fragrant richness.

Perhaps the most important thing we can ever do in our lives is find a way to keep the wild-both the wild inside and the wild outside us-and tap into it.

It's unimaginable to me that I wouldn't write, but it's very imaginable that I won't write for a little while.

Life can only be kept by giving it away. But then it will bloom.

I could run nearly naked on a hot, windy beach and plunge without care into a running diamond sea roll on the sand and fling my arms wide to the sun and still be what I was...young.

I felt tears sting into my eyes, and took a deep swallow of the first champagne I had ever tasted, remembering that I had read somewhere that the monk who invented it said, on first tasting it, 'It is like drinking stars'.

Didn't I say I'd always be your same stars? If you get to missing me, just look up.

Somebody said writing is easy, you just sit down at your typewriter and open a vein. It depends on the book. Some, I have to do quite a lot of research, which I like. Others are much closer to me.

I don't know if I would do sequels. I almost feel like when I'm done with them, they're going to have to find their own way.

Laughter nibbled at my lips like tiny fish in warm water.

I don't think you ever think of a big city as sweet or community, but there are cities that I think of as charming and particular and interesting cities. I live in one now, Charleston.

I think that sometimes the great changes in our lives, the ones that divide time, happen so deep down and silently that we don't even know when they occur......It frequently happens that the seasons of the greatest change are the times that feel the most tranquil, the most suspended, the most...timeless.

A real friendship is a light thing. A real friend holds you loosely.

Walter loves the sea, and I need it in some elemental way that I cannot even come close to verbalizing. I become dim and shriveled somehow at my very core if I am away from the sea too long. When I return to it I seem to fill up and overflow with it, soaking in the vast, sighing wetness of it like a parched vine in a long, soft spring rain.

I think we all get too caught up in doing instead of just being sometimes.

I think every creative impulse that a working writer, or artist of any sort has, comes out of that dark old country where dreams come from.

I have a theory that Southern madhouses are full of gifted women who were stifled.

Anger is its own excuse and its own reward.