I was 40 years old before I became an overnight success, and I'd been publishing for 20 years.

A dysfunctional family is any family with more than one person in it.

Sure the world breeds monsters, but kindness grows just as wild.

Even the best of us are at least part-time bastards.

Ten years, she's dead, and I still find myself some mornings reaching for the phone to call her. She could no more be gone than gravity or the moon.

The words and sentences you take into your body from books are no less sacred and healing than communion. Surely at least one such person lives in your zip code.

In my godless household, poems were the closest we came to sacred speech -- the only prayers said.

I find a great deal of comfort and care in my faith and prayer. I'd sooner do without air than prayer.

When I got sober, I thought giving up was saying goodbye to all the fun and all the sparkle, and it turned out to be just the opposite. That's when the sparkle started for me.

I'm doomed to act like myself, even when it's inconvenient!

I believe in God, but even if you don't, you can believe in a self, the person who is innately who you are. Once you fully become that person, then everything you do will be blessed.

The phoenix must burn to emerge.

Let them have guns' is as much a solution to mass murder and gun violence as 'Let them have drugs' is a solution to drug addiction.

The more you read the more places you will go, the more places you go the more things you will learn.

He who loses his mother loses a pure soul who blesses and guards him constantly.

If you mess around with jazz, you better have a good drummer and a good bass player.

I think the deepest problem is between my parents and me. I just don't know if it will ever be the same.

When both parties are lying and they both know the other party's lying, it comes powerful close to being the same thing as telling the truth.

I do not believe there is an atheist in the world who would bulldoze Mecca-or Chartres, York Minster or Notre Dame, the Shwe Dagon, the temples of Kyoto or, of course, the Buddhas of Bamiyan.

Being brave isnt supposed to be easy, but its the key to moving forward.

When a good writer is having fun, the audience is almost always having fun too.