What's more important that spiritual life? It seems to me it's the bedrock of everything essential about being human.

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

A circle's unity and never ending smoothness is how we can aim to feel inside. Smooth, gentle, accepted, no rough edges, only love for all parts of our selves.

We belong together in love, in faith and in spirit.

The happiest people seem to be those who have no particular cause for being happy except that they are so.

You say we'll soar like two birds through the clouds, but soon you'll cage me on your shelf. I'll never learn to be just me, first by myself.

Never have I thought that I was the happy possessor of a "talent;" my sole concern has been to save myself by work and faith.

What people say isn't going to stop me. I have to do things for myself.

We have substituted organizing for agonizing and equipment for endowment.

Luck rules every human endeavor, especially war.

Democracy means the power of the people and the possibility of influencing the governing parties. Russia had had enough experience with a one-party-system - we will not go back there.