The desolate narrowness, the definitive thinness of experience is both the vainglory and the dead giveaway of a provincial man.

My career still strikes me as miraculous. That a boy raised on Marine bases in the South, taught by Roman Catholic nuns in backwater Southern towns that loathed Catholics, and completed his education with an immersion into The Citadel—the whole story sounds fabricated, impossible even to me. Maybe especially to me.

He was one of those rare men who are capable of being fully in love only once in their lives.

Fierce praying was a way of finding entrance and prologue into my own writing.

The mind is an intricate mechanism that can be run on the fuels of both victory and defeatism.

I lived with the terrible knowledge that one day I would be an old man still waiting for my real life to start. Already, I pitied that old man.