The writing life is a secret life, wither we admit it or not.

Towns change; they grow or diminish, but hometowns remain as we left them.

Literature can teach us how to live before we live, and how to die before we die. I believe that writing is practice for death, and for every (other) transformation human beings encounter.

Love is the outlaw's duty.

If death is this brilliant slide, this high, fine music felt as pure vibration, this plunging float in wind and silence, it's not so bad.

Smoke veils the air like souls in drifting suspension, declining the war's insistence everyone move on.

Then he's inside you, and your body remembers, each time, every man, even if you try to forget.

Talk between women friends is always therapy.

The writer's first affinity is not to a loyalty, a tradition, a morality, a religion, but to life itself, and to its representation in language.

I write line by line, by the sound and the weight and the music of the words.

I wish I had more time to write.

If a story is in you, it has to come out.

Mother's Eden: Does your Matthew... Well, does he make you feel as if he just handed you a handful of Stars?Eden: He make me feel as if he handed me the moon as well, Mama. Maybe the whole universe.

If your eyes can not cry, then your gut will."The head and heart may be in denial of your human needs, but the gut will always carry the wisdom of your needs met and unmet, and thusly respond.

Prayer is always in danger of degenerating into a glorified gold rush. How to get things from God occupies most [books].

Suddenly she realized that what she was regretting was not the lost past but the lost future, not what had not been but what would never be.

It goes back to the early days in the kitchen where you would be tasting dishes all night long, so the last thing I want to do in the morning is eat. Chefs generally tend to be grazers.

So, instead of spending my strength quarreling with the hand, I would strike for the heart of that great tyranny.

I never really worked in Hollywood. Some American producers came to Europe to shoot films with me, so it's a different situation... It was not my aim.

What a person wills and not what they know determines their worth or unworth, power or impotence, happiness or unhappiness.

It is so much easier to talk of poverty than to think of the poor.