Duke University | Search Carolina Quotes

The search for influences in a novelist's work is doomed to trivial results.

there is never an end to building an institution.

I speak for all of us who could not afford to go to Duke, and would not have, even if we could have afforded it.

Having left various roles and come into different roles, I pride myself on being a good leaver. I just left Duke University, which I loved and still love, and I don’t allow anybody to talk to me about anything there.

Seemingly, this society wants its children to know nothing; wants its queer children to conform or (and this is not a figure of speech) die; and wants not to know that it is getting what it wants.

One of the things that 'queer' can refer to: the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone's gender, of anyone's sexuality aren't made (or can't be made) to signify monolithically.

I've heard of many people who claim they'd as soon their children were dead as gay. What it took me a long time to believe is that these people are saying no more than the truth. They even speak for others too delicate to use the cruel words.

William Blackburn [i.e. one of William Styron's teachers] cared about writing and had an almost holy concern for the langage. Before too long my work got much better. I sweated like a coolie over my essays, themes and fledgling short stories until my splintered syntax and humpbacked prose achieved a measure of clarity and grace. He informed me that one could not become a writer without a great deal of reading. To write one must read, he repeated, read . . . He was unquestionably a glorious teacher. I deeply miss him. It helped immeasurably to have him tell me, at the age of twenty-one, that I could become a writer.

I was a good student at West Point- probably not as good as I could have been or should have been, but I performed well enough there and in the eight years afterward, serving with two cavalry squadrons, that I was selected for graduate school and a teaching assignment back at West Point. I chose to pursue a master's degree in English literature at Duke University. Even in retrospect, I wouldn't suggest that at the time I was passionate about getting an advanced degree in English. I was passionate about going to graduate school in some discipline other than engineering, my undergraduate major, and I really wanted to go back to West Point to teach. The English department provided a path for me to accomplish those goals.