While I had cancer, I wrote these twenty-two personal essays about how I lived my life backed by Zen and writing.

Stress is an ignorant state. It believes that everything is an emergency.

Trust in what you love, continue to do it, and it will take you where you need to go.

Handwriting is more connected to the movement of the heart.

We are important and our lives are important, magnificent really, and their details are worthy to be recorded.

I used to think freedom meant doing whatever you want. It means knowing who you are, what you are supposed to be doing on this earth, and then simply doing it.

This is your life. You are responsible for it. You will not live forever. Don't wait.

Writers end up writing about their obsessions. Things that haunt them; things they can’t forget; stories they carry in their bodies waiting to be released.

It is odd that we never question the feasibility of a football team practicing long hours for one game; yet in writing we rarely give ourselves the space for practice.

Write what disturbs you, what you fear, what you have not been willing to speak about. Be willing to be split open.

Play around. Dive into absurdity and write. Take chances. You will succeed if you are fearless of failure.

If you can feel the future, then you are about to experience it.

Humility and knowledge in poor clothes excel pride and ignorance in costly attire.

I am not a painter, nor an artist. Therefore I can see straight, and that may be my undoing.

Everybody needs to laugh and have fun and feel good.

I was 17, certainly by the time I was 19, I knew that show business was where I was going to end up, and I had my sights on being a director.

Remember that life develops what it demands - the toughest path creates the strongest warrior. Pray not for a lighter load, but for stronger shoulders.

But. . . you said we were going to play Parcheezi. . .

Mix the the gas with the lean, call that gasoline

The other day, I was walking my dog around my building . . . on the ledge. Some people are afraid of heights. Not me, I'm afraid of widths.

Lochie. The boy I once loved. The boy I still love. The boy I will continue to love, even when my part in this world is over too.