It's much harder when you're writing about your life, than when you're writing fiction.

Resisting and avoiding pain sucks energy-and time. The more you let yourself feel those minute-and-a-half hells, the quicker you'll start feeling those minute-and-a-half happinesses.

The most reliable path to glory is base brute effort.

If you need somebody to dig up rocks eight hours a day underwater, call me.

There are still things out there in the universe to contemplate and spend our lives chasing.

I've managed to create intimacy with people I know, and people that I don't know. The longer things stay inside of us, the more we think they are black or tainted, but they're really not.

If you want to write in a mature and interesting way, you have to have sympathy for everyone that's involved.

You see things really different when your father is so intimately, so indisputably in charge of your continued existence on the planet.

When I was growing up, there were no cell phones and no roads into the bush, and so if something happened to your plane, that was serious. Nobody was coming to rescue you.

There's a kind of intimacy that happens between a mother and an only child. Which only gets more intimate when it's between a mother and only daughter.

I'm pretty much of the Shakespearean school. Dialogue is character. How we speak is who we are.

Grace is the best accessory that a woman can wear

No one else will ever see your dream until YOU envision it. See it and they’ll see it too.

If you think education is expensive - try ignorance.

If you show emotion in competition, temporarily, you'll be ineffective. If you're disciplined enough, you don't get down when you're behind, and you have a chance to create something positive.

The biggest challenge is the chaos of parenthood, which has honestly been such a welcome challenge - bring it on, I say!

The names of the plants ought to be stable [certa], consequently they should be given to stable genera.

The lens of fear magnifies the size of uncertainty.

I think that you are only obliged to be a humorist from the age of 18 until you turn 30. Past the age of 30 I don't think there is any obligation to be clever at all.

Nothing and no one in the world is valuable or worthless.

Parents are much more likely to be attuned to what they don't like than they are to the expectations that the kid is having difficulty meeting.