Without sounding pompous, I really do feel that I have a set of standards that I must adhere to, even leaving aside considerations of what the readers expect.

Life is like a prism. What you see depends on how you turn the glass.

All of us are like locks. No matter how strong the bolt, there’s always a key out there that opens it.

The science of psychotherapy is knowing what to say, the art is knowing when to say it. (36)

The characters emerge from my rather twisted mind. That's another enjoyable part of the job making stuff up.

It didn't feel difficult at the time because I was so charged up about both books. Afterward, however, I was pretty tired. In a good way, like after a great workout.

To trust someone is to take the greatest risk of all. (180)

Therapist’s dilemma: those who need help the most, run the farthest from it.

Optimism is denial for chumps with no life experience". "What's pessimism?" I said. "Religion without God.

Just because others have it worse doesn’t mean you have to suffer in silence.

I would never have been a novelist without working as a psychologist...it was a great education in human nature.

...What I depend on is a vigorous audience that can discover sweetness and light, beauty and truth, beyond the ability of the artist, on his own, to create them.

I love music. For me, music is morning coffee. It's mood medicine. It's pure magic. A good song is like a good meal-I just want to inhale it and then share a bite with someone else.

I'm trying to illuminate how perilously narrow we draw the concepts of masculinity and sexuality in our male culture.

Awareness is conscious connection with universal intelligence. Another word for it is Presence: consciousness without thought.

The history of an art is the history of masterwork, not of failures, or mediocrity.

Attending a Sarah Palin rally was simultaneously one of the strangest and most chilling events of my life.

The difficulty with humorists is that they will mix what they believe with what they don't; whichever seems likelier to win an effect.

Love, and do what you will. If you keep silence, do it out of love. If you cry out, do it out of love. If you refrain from punishing, do it out of love.

The real danger in life is not death, but living an evil life.

I tend to think of action movies as exuberant morality plays in which good triumphs over evil.