We're all simultaneously separated and connected by our devices, staring into our little screens, and also hungry for experience and community.

I try to remember that the job - as well as the plight, and the unexpected joy - of the artist is to embrace uncertainty, to be sharpened and honed by it.

It is in the thousands of days of trying, failing, sitting, thinking, resisting, dreaming, raveling, unraveling that we are at our most engaged, alert, and alive.

Writing has been my window-flung wide open to this magnificent, chaotic existence-my way of interpreting everything within my grasp.

Everything you need to know about life can be learned from a genuine and ongoing attempt to write

If I dismiss the ordinary—waiting for the special, the extreme, the extraordinary to happen - I may just miss my life.

I do whatever is necessary in order to maintain the equanimity we all need to withstand the disappointment and rejection that are the lot of every writer, no matter where we are in our careers.

The only graceful thing to do is recognize and embrace what is actually happening, rather than fight against it.

My desk is covered with talismans: pieces of rose quartz, wishing stones from a favorite beach.

How do we live the writer's life? There's only one simple answer: 'we write.'

If you are a writer or any kind of artist, if you change something as fundamental as where you live - the way you live - then I think you change the very instrument that is trying to make the art

Fame is not the same as success, and in our true souls we know that.

The great ages did not perhaps produce much more talent than ours, ' [T.S.] Eliot wrote. 'But less talent was wasted.

The great artists are those who impose their personal vision upon humanity.

To the victors belong the spoils.

I love to cook a meal for the so-called holidays. You always need the turkey. I like making a good BBQ brisket as well.

If you're just grinding up hamburger at McDonald's, I see that as a bit of an affront to living things. You're not really honoring the life.

Let him who looks for a monument to Washington look around the United States. Your freedom, your independence, your national power, your prosperity, and your prodigious growth are a monument to him.

When I write, I wear earplugs. I don't want to be self-conscious. I don't want to be thinking about the fact that I'm thinking about it. I just want to be in it. It's one element of hypnosis.

For I am not so enamoured of my own opinions that I disregard what others may think of them.

A country without a language is a country without a soul.