If you write memoir, it can't be about blame or hurt; it has to be creative.

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

To achieve self actualization, do good things for other people that you would want to be done onto yourself

Intuition ... appears to be the extrasensory perception of reality.

Man goeth to his long home and the mourners go about the streets.

When you come from a family of storytellers, you're doomed. You just have to tell stories.

Faith in to-morrow, instead of Christ, is Satan's nurse for man's perdition.

It seems a shallow observation, but... the Tory Conference are not an attractive lot, are they? I mean, if all those people were born in the same village, you'd blame pollution, wouldn't you?

A splendour of miscellaneous spirits.

No idea is isolated, but is only what it is among all ideas.

Most of the birds of the Old World can be found here, as Oman is on a strategic route for migrating birds

...there's no such thing as an underwear elf. Even when it goes missing, it's somewhere in the room. So make sure you find it." -- DARK OF NIGHT by Suzanne Brockmann