We are constantly being put to the test by trying circumstances and difficult people and problems not necessarily of our own making.

Hurt leads to bitterness, bitterness to anger, travel too far that road and the way is lost.

This is for writers yet to be published who think the uphill climb will never end. Keep believing. This is also for published writers grown jaded by the process. Remember how lucky you are.

The muse whispers to you when she chooses, and you can't tell her to come back later, because you quickly learn in this business that she might not come back at all.

If you do not hear music in your words, you have put too much thought into your writing and not enough heart.

We live out our lives as we are meant to live them-with some choice, with some chance, but mostly as a result of the persons we are.

Growing up, I didn't have a lot of toys, and personal entertainment depended on individual ingenuity and imagination - think up a story and go live it for an afternoon.

We forget that what matters begins with the imagination.

Fear is a fire to temper courage and resolve. Use it so.

We must nurture and love, if life is to have any real meaning. But First we must find a way to survive against the things that prevent us from doing so.

Why pretend to be something you're not? If you have to be someone, be someone no one else is.

I need the thing that happens when your brain shuts off and your heart turns on.

For me, a paragraph in a novel is a bit like a line in a poem. It has its own shape, its own music, its own integrity.

For me it's important to be in balance. To not let fear get in the way of things, to not worry so much about protecting yourself all the time.

The greatest good you can do for another is not just to share your riches but to reveal to him his own.

We need to become a more welcoming church, one that reaches out more to those who have walked away or who aren't very interested to begin with.

I do not write for the public. You are my public and I hope to convert you.

The art world is molting - some would say melting. Galleries are closing; museums are scaling back.

Sometimes I guess you need to lose everything before you realize what's really important.

After years of buying clothes I intend to diet into, I'll say this: the skeleton in my closet has some really nice outfits.

The spectacle of insensitivity that is the gun lobby and its outspoken, out-of-their-mind apparatchiks, is the apotheosis of what the Republican Party has allowed itself to become.