Writers should take advantage of their surroundings, if only to trigger memories that juice their writing.

Now is History as fast as the mind remembers.

Love is a tough, ever hopeful thing, not easily destroyed.

It's no fun watching you disintegrate. Where is the old "I Love Myself" mantra? You need to feel you are indeed lovable and that your life matters. Listen. The birds are singing your name.

I learned that famous writers are people with foibles like anyone else and this helped me realize reaching their level of notoriety wasn't impossible.

It is true that I grew up in an affluent neighborhood and went to a prestigious school. But there were horrors that went on behind closed doors.

I'm fascinated how owning something, especially something as big as a home, can affect your political leanings. Home ownership spawns thoughts of equity and maintaining value.

My dark comic edge is the end result of trying to use humor to maintain my sanity growing up in a dysfunctional family in Honolulu.

Anyone who wants to be a writer should, if given the opportunity, hang out with "real writers," that is, poets or writers who are lions in literature, semi-lions, or published authors.

For the first time I realized adults could back themselves into corners so remote that love, or its memory, could no longer reach them.

Emotions are the road signs to your happiness.

I hate to go to movies or watch a TV show and know the ending within 15 minutes.

To experience real agony is something hard to write about, impossible to understand while it grips you; you're frightened out of your wits, can’t sit still, move, or even go decently insane.

Human memory is short and terribly fickle.

If a horse doesn't want to do something, you're not going to make him do it. They're incredibly powerful animals.

You can't break what's broken already.

Having a trade deficit and a budget deficit, it's two different things.

To be a friend takes time, and time is what nobody has. Therefore, real friends are rare.

Balanced budget requirements seem more likely to produce accounting ingenuity than genuinely balanced budgets.

The less said about the putter the better. Here is an instrument of torture, designed by Tantalus and forged in the devil's own smithy.