My natural inclination is to think in scenes. So that's how I write, and the issue for me is usually: what to compress for speed.

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.

Once I had a rose named after me and I was very flattered. But I was not pleased to read the description in the catalogue: "No good in a bed, but fine up against a wall.

True, life is complex. But so are a great many accidents.

To maximize time is to make sure that every second, minute and hour counts

The practice of understanding, forgiveness, and love is the best practice for a peaceful world.

Take the stones people throw at you, and use them to build a monument

I think education and intelligence (are) important, but not art. Not artistic education.

Increasingly unable to create for itself a relevant body of myth, the modern imagination will ransack the treasure house of the classic.

We were with Hayden Schlossberg enormous fans of that first American Pie. We were in college when it came out, and we watched it over and over and over again.

If the United Nations does not attempt to chart a course for the world's people in the first decades of the new millennium, who will?

I have decided, it is fruitless. For I am no longer sure of anything concerning my existance. A philosopher is a dead poet and a dying theologian.