I speak, I speak, and truth at that. Writers are a curious breed: brooding, fickle, alternately loving and hating their work—and each other. You’re my friend? Don’t pick up that pen!

I’ve had a fountain pen surgically implanted in my left index finger to save trouble. My body is tattooed with line upon line of truth, fiction, and a not-always-pleasing mix of the two.

When I pour a bowl of Uncle Sam’s cereal, I never know if I should stand when I eat, salute it first, or simply hum the Star Spangled Banner between mouthfuls.

Without the hard we stay too soft, and heaven is reduced to myths like life. Theology aside, it’s plain to see that God forbids we get too comfortable.

Today I fed him right off the bat, and only checked Facebook twice.

If a book can save—redeem us from the mediocrity of the mundane—surely, there must be a God.

Nonfiction. I didn’t choose it as much as it chose me. It squatted and birthed me one raw winter day then jerked me up and set me to scribing.

I think that’s why I write—the not knowing and the blasted good feeling I get out of it all.

Writing makes me hard, like a fisherman, and brown from the heat. Tossing out and reeling in is a job for visionaries and those with calloused hands.

In this book, much is metaphorical, not as it seems. It’s written for writing’s sake, as if I were to say, “Let me tell you I’m dying.” Well of course I am. So are you.

This world rubs me raw, scours me smooth like an SOS pad put to a grease-caked skillet. And pain: it stabs and scrapes and pulls me back to earth, my final B&B, that worm-spun cot of cool black sod.

I don't want you to leave. I want you to stay.

There are few uglier traits of human nature than this tendency—which I now witnessed in men no worse than their neighbours—to grow cruel, merely because they possessed the power of inflicting harm.

True love is like ghosts which everybody talks about and few have seen.

People are much deeper than stereotypes. That's the first place our minds go. Then you get to know them and you hear their stories, and you say, 'I'd have never guessed.

The activities you are most afraid of are the activities that can cause a breakthrough in your success. Step into them.

Age doesn't matter, unless you are cheese.

The biggest problem is not to let people accept new ideas, but to let them forget the old ones.

Only the mad girls chase me, I think.

Ted Cruz will point Americans back to the principles established by our Constitution enabling you to live free.

It was like making a blunder at a party; there was nothing to do about it, it was dreadfully mortifying, but it showed a lack of sense to ascribe too much importance to it.