The responsibility of literatuure is to make people awake, present, alive. If the writer wanders, then the reader, too, will wander.

Write what disturbs you, what you fear, what you have not been willing to speak about. Be willing to be split open.

Play around. Dive into absurdity and write. Take chances. You will succeed if you are fearless of failure.

If you are not afraid of the voices inside you, you will not fear the critics outside you.

I think talent is like a water table under the earth—you tap it with your effort and it comes through you.

poems are small moments of enlightenment

Writing is the act of discovery.

Begin with “I remember.” Write lots of small memories. If you fall into one large memory, write that. Just keep going. Don’t be concerned if the memory happened five seconds ago or five years ago.

It’s good to go off and write a novel, but don’t stop doing writing practice.

Keep your hand moving. (Don’t pause to reread the line you have just written. That’s stalling and trying to get control of what you’re saying.)

Anything or everything can happen. You determine how good or bad they are

Whatever you acknowledgement gains the legitimacy to exist within your world.

The true Christian is one who is kind of sick of this world. If I find anybody who is settled down too snugly into this world, I am made to doubt whether he's ever truly been born again

Keep in mind that your individual vote doesn't mean anything.

That is now my mission: to provide a European vision of growth, employment, prosperity - in one word, our future.

Put a man and a girl on stage and there is already a story; a man and two girls, there's already a plot.

Death row is a nightmare to serial killers and ax murderers. For an innocent man, it's a life of mental torture that the human spirit is not equipped to survive.

The 1910 Edison film of Frankenstein was itself a dead thing revived by technology.

There's nothing you need to do, be, have, get, change, practice, or learn in order to be happy, loving and whole.

I'd hate to be really beautiful on telly and then have everyone go, 'It's all make-up and lighting.