I wondered if I was just the sum of my brain scan, little dots clustered in my frontal lobe. Is that where the poems came from?.

The world doesn't fully make sense until the writer has secured his version of it on the page. And the act of writing is strangely more lifelike than life.

No matter how many compromises were made along the way, no matter what happens in the future, a book is a thing to behold.

Indeed, the great paradox of the writer's life is how much time he spends alone trying to connect with other people.

But editors are still the world's readers. And thus the eyes of the world.

The writer labors in isolation, yet all that intensive, lonely work is in the service of communicating, is an attempt to reach another person.

... but every person who does serious time with a keyboard is attempting to translate his version of the world into words so that he might be understood.

[I]t's the child writer who has figured out, early on, that writing is about saving your soul.

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I can not change. The courage to change the things I can. And the wisdom to know the difference. I still didn't know the difference.

Nothing was a more powerful compass of my mood or a better indication of my self-worth than the number on the scale.

...but every person who does serious time with a keyboard is attempting to translate his version of the world into words so that he might be understood.

Life is so much better when we dwell on awe-inspired thoughts.

This is our Country, there is nobody else who is going to come from outside to defend us. We need to wake up and defend ourselves to make this Country a beautiful and better Country for all of us.

There is no unhappiness like the misery of sighting land again after a cheerful careless voyage.

You are done for - a living dead man - not when you stop loving but stop hating. Hatred preserves: in it, in its chemistry, resides the mystery of life.

The act of bell ringing is symbolic of all proselytizing religions. It implies the pointless interference with the quiet of other people.

When a mother dies, a daughter’s mourning never completely ends.

First of all, my persuasion is what really breeds violence is political differences. But because religion serves as the soul of community, it gets drawn into the fracas and turns up the heat.

For a lot of us, we feel nostalgic about something with distance, and then [when] we go back to that thing, you remember why we left in the first place.

The chief mourner does not always attend the funeral.

[Wind energy] takes a very large footprint on the land, five to 10 times what you'd use for nuclear, and typically to get one gigawatt of electricity is on the order of 250 square miles of wind farm.