Only a few of us are going to be willing to break our own hearts by trading in the living beauty of imagination for the stark disappointment of words.

Writing is a job, a talent, but it's also the place to go in your head. It is the imaginary friend you drink your tea with in the afternoon.

Part of it is living in Tennessee. I'm so out of the loop. And as a person, I'm out of the loop. I'm oblivious by nature.

Never be so focused on what you're looking for that you overlook the thing you actually find.

No matter how much we love a book, the experience of reading it isn't complete until we can give it to someone who will love it as much as we do

You are always someones favorite unfolding story

Just because things hadn't gone the way I had planned didn't necessarily mean they had gone wrong.

I can write for any magazine now, in any voice. I can do it in two hours, I could do it in my sleep, it's like writing a grocery list.

There can be something cruel about people who have had good fortune. They equate it with personal goodness.

Sometimes not having any idea where we’re going works out better than we could possibly have imagined.

You can’t control what other people think about your art. Think about the part of yourself that you can control, which is your ability to be kind and loving and creative.

To endeavor to work upon the vulgar with fine sense is like attempting to hew blocks with a razor.

Men are restless, adventurous. Women are conservative - despite what current ideology says.

No man ever made a great discovery without the exercise of the imagination.

Poverty is a very complicated issue, but feeding a child isn't.

Whether something 'has color' or not is as hard to define verbally as are such questions as, 'What is music?' or 'What is musical?

I get twitchy if I don't pick up a guitar or sit at the piano every now and then... I have to do it; I don't have a choice.

Men exist for each other. Then either improve them, or put up with them.

Quests always have their ups and downs,' rumbled the giant. 'The point is never to give up, even if you're falling off a cliff. You never know what might happen on the way to the bottom.

The cold war is over; Japan won.

As soon as Oliver Twist is serialized, people who would never dream of reading [Charles] Dickens, if they hadn't seen him on their box, buy the paperback.