I grew up with some kind of storytelling instinct, and when I write, my default setting is to find a story and then to tell it. It's the only way I know how to write.

Attention shifted to him like sunflowers turning to the sun.

hills that stand soft and a sky that stands high and blue, and the sun setting behind a windmill, and always, always, hazy strings of mountains that fall and fall away on the horizon.

One could not count the moons that shimmer on her roofs, Or the thousand splendid suns that hide behind her walls.

And that's the thing about people who mean everything they say. They think everyone else does too.

A man who has no conscience, no goodness, does not suffer.

Nothing good came free. Even love. You paid for all things. And if you were poor, suffering was your currency.

But time, it is like charm. You never have as much as you think.

The desert weed lives on, but the flower of spring blooms and wilts.

I wondered if that was how forgiveness budded; not with the fanfare of epiphany, but with pain gathering its things, packing up, and slipping away unannounced in the middle of the night.

Quiet is peace. Tranquility. Quiet is turning down the volume knob on life. Silence is pushing the off button. Shutting it down. All of it.

when you look to some one, That moment you looked away from yourself.

Writing a memoir has a particularly excited sense of narcissism.

..When I first heard Elvis' voice, I knew that I wasn't going to work for anybody ... hearing him for the first time was like busting out of jail

Keep your head up and smile, because someone somewhere wants to see you fail.

But that's what we all are-just stories. We only exist by how people remember us, by the stories we make of our lives. Without the stories, we'd just fade away.

The notes I have made are not a diary in the ordinary sense, but partly lengthy records of my spiritual experiences, and partly poems in prose.

If politics is the art of the possible, theatre is the art of the impossible.

I know a movie and a book are two different things and you are going do different media in different ways. No author can want a movie to be exactly like the book because then it will be a bad movie.

The history of Christianity, therefore, must be of concern to all who are interested in the record of man and particularly to all who seek to understand the contemporary human scene.

A man can live and be healthy without killing animals for food; therefore, if he eats meat, he participates in taking animal life merely for the sake of his appetite.