I have always known that writing fiction had little effect on the world; that if it did, young men would not have gone to war after The Iliad.

I think the deeper you go into questions, the deeper or more interesting the questions get. And I think that's the job of art.

One of the things I learned about writing a memoir is you can’t drag the reader through everything. Every human life is worth 20 memoirs.

I see a lot of marriages crash and burn around me and my wife. I've always been curious about how hard it is to love well and be loved.

Fear is a ghost; embrace your fear, and all you’ll see in your arms is yourself.

As a matter of writing philosophy, if there is one, I try not to ever plot a story. I try to write it from the character's point of view and see where it goes.

I've learned over the years that the writing is smarter and far larger than the writer and his or her own desires for it.

Somewhere, sometime I'd stopped expecting my father to father.

I read poetry every day. I love the boiled down essence of poetry. I look for poetry in prose. In a way that evocative.

What is art if not a concentrated and impassioned effort to make something with the little we have, the little we see?

My mother was making $135 a week, but she had resilience and imagination. She might take frozen vegetables, cook them with garlic, onion and Spam, and it would taste like a four-star dinner.

Though people know the meaning of the word acceptance, people are ignorant about it. Thinking acceptance may hurt their self esteem.

If you have real, internal value, you don't need a loud, expensive imitation.

If you want to experience the unalloyed ecstasy of life, you can accomplish this through the twin Buddhist practices of meditation and mindfulness.

Safe in the hallowed quiets of the past.

By doubting we come at truth.

I love money, but will money ever love me in return?

The true miracle is not walking on water or walking in air, but simply walking on this earth.

Movies have been doing so much of the same thing - in slightly different ways - for so long that few of the possibilities of this great hybrid art have yet been explored.

I'm not an actor. I can show up for friends and improvise a little bit, but I'm not an actor.

Catholic theology believes that God gave man free will, and you can't give somebody free will and then send in a play from the sidelines.