Quotes About Experience

You do not learn how to write novels in a writing program. You learn how by leading an interesting life. Open yourself up to all experience. Let life pour through you the way light pours through leaves.

Hurt is a great teacher, maybe the greatest of all.

Because we're human. Like everyone else. And the older we get, the more human we get. The more human we get, the more painful everything becomes.

And in that instant was born the terrible awareness that life eventually broke every man, but in different ways and at different times.

I mourn for the quicksilvery racehorse passage of time. Its swiftness has caught me with the same ineffable start that comes to every man and woman who lives long enough. It remains as the single great surprise of any life. In

Reading Tolstoy makes us strive to be better people: better husbands and wives, children, and friends. He tries to teach us how to live by letting us participate in the brimming, storied experiences of his fictional world. Reading Leo Tolstoy, you will encounter a novelist who fell in love with his world and everything he saw and felt in it.

I take account of my life and find that I have lived a lot and learned very little.

From the beginning, I've told journalists that I planned to write better than any writer of my era who graduated from an Ivy League college. It sounds boastful and it is. But The Citadel taught me that I was a man of courage when I survived that merciless crucible of a four-year test that is the measure of The Citadel experience. I'm the kind of writer I am because of The Citadel.

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

On the road, he was alive, vibrant, moving. It didn't afford the freedom of a jet plane flying through a clear sky, but a highway offered something almost as profound, an entry into the secret regions of the earth where towns with foreign, unrecallable names were violated once, then forgotten for all time.

A woman in Charlotte approached me and said that she's tired of the dysfunction in my novels. I told her I was sorry, but that is how the world has presented itself to me throughout my life.

I never seemed to learn from joy; I earned my portion of wisdom through sadness.

He had the soul of a fortress and eyes that had peered at the world from battlements too long.

taught autistic children in Georgetown County and when asked about why he chose such a profession he would say, "After growing up in this family, I found autism refreshing.

let them feel the hurt and sorrow of history.

It's politics . . . It makes everybody stupid. When you grow up, you'll know what I mean.

In the lowcountry, the smell of the marshlands is offensive to visitors, but is the fragrant essence of the planet to the native born.

I ordered a Manhattan, honoring the island on which I sat, and only when I tasted the ghastly concoction did I remember why I had never developed a fondness for that particular cocktail.

Here, open wide and let it slide," he said, tilting a half-shell into Ben's mouth. The oyster hit Ben's mouth. It felt warm, salty, and had the consistency of loose phlegm. For a moment, Ben thought he was going to vomit. Somehow, he got the animal down his throat.

It's dangerous to write about what you don't know, I said. Ledare got up to go and said, It's dangerous not to.

Teaching is a record of failures. But the glory of teaching is in the attempt.

one afflicted with all the hurt and burden and grandeur of memory. I wondered if they could see the difference.

This book demonstrates again and again that there is no passion more rewarding than reading itself, that it remains the best way to dream and to feel the sheer carnal joy of being fully and openly alive.

I became a good writer when I saw the age of forty coming at me