Quotes from John Berendt

Rule number one: Always stick around for one more drink. That's when things happen. That's when you find out everything you want to know.

Keep a diary, but don't just list all the things you did during the day. Pick one incident and write it up as a brief vignette. Give it color, include quotes and dialogue, shape it like a story with a beginning, middle and end—as if it were a short story or an episode in a novel. It's great practice. Do this while figuring out what you want to write a book about. The book may even emerge from within this running diary.

She was a marvel. She did exactly as she pleased all her life, God bless her.

Loneliness is not being alone, It's loving others to no avail.

By morning she was dead. She had not died of starvation or committed suicide by any conventional means. She had simply willed herself to die, and being a strong-willed woman, she had succeeded. She had missed dying on her birthday by two days.

But I never think about dead people. Looking at these old graves makes me think how generation after generation of the same family are all gathered together. And that makes me think about how life goes on, but not about dying. I never think about dying.

Someone once wrote that musicians are touched on the shoulder by God, and I think it's true. You can make other people happy with music, but you can make yourself happy too. Because of my music, I have never known loneliness and never been depressed.

For me, Savannah's resistance to change was its saving grace. The city looked inward, sealed off from the noises and distractions of the world at large. It grew inward, too, and in such a way that its people flourished like hothouse plants tended by an indulgent gardener. The ordinary became extraordinary. Eccentrics thrived. Every nuance and quirk of personality achieved greater brilliance in that lush enclosure than would have been possible anywhere else in the world.

Black magic never stops. What goes from you comes to you. Once you start this shit, you gotta keep it up. Just like the utility bill. Just like the grocery store. Or they kill you. You got to keep it up. Two, five, ten, twenty years.

If there's a single trait common to all Savannahians, it's their love of money and their unwillingness to spend it.

Never spend any of your hard-earned money on clothes and accessories. You need to get yourself a mayyin to buy all that for you.

Quoting Miss Harty:] "People come here from all over the country and fall in love with Savannah. Then they move here and pretty soon they're telling us how much more lively and prosperous Savannah could be if we only knew what we had and how to take advantage of it. I call these people 'Gucci carpetbaggers.

We have a saying: If you go to Atlanta, the first question people ask you is, 'What's your business?' In Macon they ask, 'Where do you go to church?' In Augusta they ask your grandmother's maiden name. But in Savannah the first question people ask you is 'What would you like to drink?

The South is one big drag show, honey [...].

Sport, truth, like art, is in the eye of the beholder. You believe what you choose and I'll believe what I know

Sometimes I just can't face going through with breakfast.

If there were not a bridge from Venice to Europe, Europe would be an island

Don't you feel cut off?" I asked. "Cut off from what?" she replied. "No, on the whole I'd say we rather enjoy our separateness.

How do you do that?" I asked. "What do witches eat?" "Witches loves pork meat," she said. "They loves rice and potatoes. They loves black-eyed peas and cornbread. Lima beans, too, and collard greens and cabbage, all cooked in pork fat. Witches is old folks, most of them. They don't care none for low-cal. You pile that food on a paper plate, stick a plastic fork in it, and set it down by the side of a tree. And that feeds the witches." The

Savannah was invariably gracious to strangers, but it was immune to their charms. It wanted nothing so much as to be left alone. Time

Jim Williams's guilt or innocence is no longer the issue," he said. "Spencer Lawton's incompetence is the issue.

more drink. That's when things happen. That's when you find out everything you want to know.

That you are a worldly adult,' she said. 'You have spent your whole life letting go of the innocent dreams that made your childhood so warm and hopeful and full of certainty. Dream by dream you let them go. We all do it, to shield ourselves from disappointment. It's easy to shed them. Not so easy to get them back.

For me, Savannah's resistance to change was its saving grace. The city looked inward, sealed off from the noises and distractions of the world at large. It grew inward, too, and in such a way that its people flourished like hothouse plants tended by an indulgent gardener. The ordinary became extraordinary. Eccentrics thrived. Every nuance and quirk of personality achieved greater brilliance in that lush enclosure than would have been possible anywhere else in the world.