We receive and we lose, and we must try to achieve gratitude; and with that gratitude to embrace with whole hearts whatever of life that remains after the losses.

I think the deeper you go into questions, the deeper or more interesting the questions get. And I think that's the job of art.

One of the things I learned about writing a memoir is you can’t drag the reader through everything. Every human life is worth 20 memoirs.

I see a lot of marriages crash and burn around me and my wife. I've always been curious about how hard it is to love well and be loved.

Fear is a ghost; embrace your fear, and all you’ll see in your arms is yourself.

As a matter of writing philosophy, if there is one, I try not to ever plot a story. I try to write it from the character's point of view and see where it goes.

I've learned over the years that the writing is smarter and far larger than the writer and his or her own desires for it.

I have always known that writing fiction had little effect on the world; that if it did, young men would not have gone to war after The Iliad.

Somewhere, sometime I'd stopped expecting my father to father.

I read poetry every day. I love the boiled down essence of poetry. I look for poetry in prose. In a way that evocative.

What is art if not a concentrated and impassioned effort to make something with the little we have, the little we see?

Art must take reality by surprise.

Most of the people in the workforce today will spend some years when they also have children and family responsibilities.

Don’t complicate whatever is not complicated.

Salome had but seven veils; the artist has a thousand.

When my face is flushed with blood, it becomes red and obscene. It betrays at the same time, through morbid reflexes, a bloody erection and a demanding thirst for indecency and criminal debauchery.

Government should exist in order to help fortify the country and make those who are in need better able to meet their own.

I'm not a liar, sir,' she said. "'No, I'm sure you sincerely become whatever it is you're pretending to be.

Maybe I'll learn how, but the only thing I can do is turn down parts that would hurt my conscience.

Could it be that toxic mimics are toxic because they ignore responsibility, they ignore relationship, they ignore presence, they substitute control for fluidity and choice?