Bad teachers do not touch me; the great ones never leave me.

I became a novelist because of 'Gone With the Wind,' or more precisely, my mother raised me up to be a 'Southern' novelist, with a strong emphasis on the word 'Southern' because 'Gone With the Wind' set my mother's imagination ablaze when she was a young girl growing up in Atlanta.

I told my kids when they were little, 'Look, kids, your mother and I are screwing you up somehow. We don't understand how, or we wouldn't do it. But we're parents. So somehow we're damaging you, and I want you to know that early. So just ignore me when I go to that part of my parenting.'

I meet kids now who become novelists, poets, write for the theater and movies, who were simply inspired by what they saw during the Spoleto Festival.

Unfortunately, the record I did with Motley wasn't exactly a huge success. But working with those guys was a huge learning experience as well as a really creative time, so I had an absolute blast during that five years of my life!

One thing we cannot put a number on is the number of casualties because people were never connected to their purpose in life.

Life's not so rocky now. It was very volatile when you're young: you've got no experience. Your sense of disappointment is far greater; your sense of success is overwhelming. And then you've got the emotional conflict within any group that you're not mature enough to deal with until you get older. It levels out.

Coincidence is a recognized element in 'real life.' All of us have anecdotes about those times when, by the merest coincidence, we avoided some disaster or stumbled onto some wonderful experience.