Most kids grow up leaving something out for Santa at Christmas time when he comes down the chimney. I used to make presents for the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

Why is the measure of love loss?

Yes, the stories are dangerous, she was right. A book is a magic carpet that flies you off elsewhere. A book is a door. You open it. You step through. Do you come back?

...there are two kinds of writing: the one you write and the one that writes you.

Part fact part fiction is what life is. And it is always a cover story. I wrote my way out.

Six books… my mother didn’t want books falling into my hands. It never occurred to her that I fell into the books – that I put myself inside them for safe keeping.

Sometimes you have to live in precarious and temporary places. Unsuitable places. Wrong places. Sometimes the safe place won't help you.

Where you are born--what you are born into, the place, the history of the place, how that history mates with your own-- stamps who you are, whatever the pundits of globalisation have to say.

Memory loss is one way of coping with damage.

To tell someone not to be emotional is to tell them to be dead.

We bury things so deep we no longer remember there was anything to bury. Our bodies remember. Our neurotic states remember. But we don't.

This is the shade of difference: the door of the physician should never be shut, the door of the priest should always be open.

If mass media, social isolation in the suburbs, alienating workplaces and long car commutes create a bunker mentality, the Internet does the opposite.

Those who employ their modest talents as best they can do make a contribution to a better human future.

I always look old when I work because I get so upset and tense that my face wrinkles up like a prune, I can't stop it.

Love, I thought, is stronger than death or the fear of death. Only by it, by love, life holds together and advances.

Life is sweetest when it could go away tomorrow.

Write one good clean sentence and put a period at the end of it. Then write another one.

Our destiny is tied up with the destiny of America.

I'm not an optimist. I'm a realist. And my reality is that we live in a multifaceted, multicultural world. And maybe once we stop labeling ourselves, then maybe everyone else will.

Every church is flawed. Still, you'd better learn to love it since it's the only group Jesus said he's taking to Heaven.