It was a splendid summer morning and it seemed as ...

I can't write without a reader. It's precisely like a kiss - you can't do it alone.

For me, a page of good prose is where one hears the rain and the noise of battle. It has the power to give grief or universality that lends it a youthful beauty.

The need to write comes from the need to make sense of one's life and discover one's usefulness.

True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.

Probably the happiest period in life most frequently is in middle age, when the eager passions of youth are cooled, and the infirmities of age not yet begun as we see that the shadows, which are at morning and evening so large, almost entirely disappear at midday.

I saw how many people were poor and how many kids my age went to school hungry in the morning, which I don't think most of my contemporaries in racially segregated schools in the South thought very much about at the time.

A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight.