I think so much about how we read, about the nature of solitude, and of community, is changing in ways that none of us yet understand.

I try to remember that the job - as well as the plight, and the unexpected joy - of the artist is to embrace uncertainty, to be sharpened and honed by it.

It is in the thousands of days of trying, failing, sitting, thinking, resisting, dreaming, raveling, unraveling that we are at our most engaged, alert, and alive.

Writing has been my window-flung wide open to this magnificent, chaotic existence-my way of interpreting everything within my grasp.

Everything you need to know about life can be learned from a genuine and ongoing attempt to write

If I dismiss the ordinary—waiting for the special, the extreme, the extraordinary to happen - I may just miss my life.

I do whatever is necessary in order to maintain the equanimity we all need to withstand the disappointment and rejection that are the lot of every writer, no matter where we are in our careers.

The only graceful thing to do is recognize and embrace what is actually happening, rather than fight against it.

My desk is covered with talismans: pieces of rose quartz, wishing stones from a favorite beach.

How do we live the writer's life? There's only one simple answer: 'we write.'

If you are a writer or any kind of artist, if you change something as fundamental as where you live - the way you live - then I think you change the very instrument that is trying to make the art

You can’t has, ' he whispered softly, 'not yours.

Recall that the minimum wage was initially conceived as a method to exclude undesirables from the workforce.

Either you must control your thoughts or the outside forces will control them and be warned that the outside forces are usually negative.

Those minutiae calcify into the bones of our intimacy.

I could never teach people to be philosophers - and if I did, you could never make a gardener out of them.

Come as you are. If you are the blackest soul out of hell, trust Christ, and that act of trust shall make you clean.

The dreams in which I'm dying are the best I've ever had.

Don't believe anyone who says, "I alone can fix it." Americans don't say, "I alone can fix it." We say, "We'll fix it together!"

I always wondered how I could tell when the right one came along - but it was easy. He was the only one that came along.

I still find trusting people quite hard. I've got a couple of mates that I do let in, but that's it. It's something I've got to sort out - I cut people off.