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

Open your hearts. Deep inside ourselves, we are all one and the same.

Imagine fantasy and pretend as neither fantastical nor pretended.....and then believe it.

Have you ever been at a point that you don't know what to say? But yet you came up with this crazy idea to type this.

I try to live in such a way that nothing gets bigger than my awareness of God presence on my life.

The Great Chief also honours modesy.

If you never did you should. These things are fun and fun is good.

And I still buy books at B&N, Borders and Elliot Bay ... I probably shouldn't admit this. But I don't care. I love great bookstores.

It is by those who have suffered that the world has been advanced.

Insurgents throughout Iraq continue to threaten our efforts and pose a danger to stability in the region. They fight not for their country, but rather against ours.

For a Canadian, natural resources were a good fit.

Concentration is the secret of strength in politics, in war, in trade, in short in all management of human affairs.