Writers end up writing stories-or rather, stories' shadows-and they're grateful if they can, but it is not enough. Nothing the writer can do is ever enough

Of course there is nothing that cannot be done incorrectly.

A writer loves the dark, loves it, but is always fumbling around in the light.

You must stop worrying about why things happen and wonder what they mean when they do.

The story knows itself better than the writer does at some point, knows what's being said before the writer figures out how to say it.

Nothing we do is inevitable, but everything we do is irreversible.

Why does the writer write? The writer writes to serve--hopeless ly he writes in the hope that he might serve--not himself and not others, but that great cold elemental grace that knows us.

Words at night were feral things.

There is something unwholesome and destructive about the entire writing process.

One writes to find words' meanings.

There is a certain type of conversation one hears only when one is drunk and it is like a dream, full of humor and threat and significance, deep significance.

It is far better to endure patiently a smart which nobody feels but yourself, than to commit a hasty action whose evil consequences will extend to all connected with you.

Good or bad, if you’re not “normal, ” you can’t have a normal relationship. If you are different, people will relate to you differently.

The inner chambers of the soul are like the photographer's darkroom. Like a laboratory. One cannot stay there all the time or it becomes the solitary cell of the neurotic.

I studied voice for about two years with an amazing coach, and I never rose above the level of mediocre.

His second cycle of teachings discusses the cosmology of the universes. But in his later years, he wrote the tantric texts.

It is a remarkable fact, a scientific fact, that the healthiest children come from the happiest mothers.

You must become an old man in good time if you wish to be an old man long. [Lat., Mature fieri senem, si diu velis esses senex.]

I have come to really love the sound of nervous laughter.

Observation, not old age, brings wisdom.

What happens, matters. Maybe only to us but it matters.