You see only the beautiful things when you stand still. You only see things that you don't ordinarily notice. The birds are the prettiest things, I imagine.

It never occurs to you when you are very young to need something other than what your parents have to offer you.

Love is a big and wonderful idea, but life is made up of small things. As a kid, you have nothing to do with the way the world is run; you just have to hurry to catch up with it.

Adolescents are attracted to tragic heroes. That's why rock stars dress like homeless people. Adolescence is a fall. It's when every child becomes an orphan.

A lot of children grow up in poverty with flawed parents, but their inner world is still as inherently filled with wonder and innocence as children who are kept away from the city's underbelly.

I had a ludicrous childhood, but I feel that I was able to profit from a lot of the idiotic and unfortunate things that happened to me by turning them into fiction.

In the temporary illumination of the headlights, the insects were scribbling out messages from God that we couldn't get.

Adolescents are still children in that they can't yet tell the difference between make believe and fiction.

The stars are always up in the sky...then when it is perfectly black, they feel less vulnerable and out they come.

Somewhere, a sparrow is singing in B minor.

From the way that people have always talked about your heart being broken, it sort of seemed to be a one-time thing. Mine seemed to break all the time.

Make today worth remembering.

Without a measure of anger against injustice, a person, a society or a whole nation would have to live perpetually under the bondage of injustice.

Had he already inspired a passion in some stranger’s heart?

When I'm sitting at the desk not being able to write line one, it's silence and despair! It's not so easy to put the pen to the legal pad or type the first sentence on the computer screen.

I'm Mozart with a focus on the tide Hiding the inconsistencies of man behind water and wine

Like a house in the rain, books were havens of permanence and protection from whatever it was that as a child I needed protection from.

No man ever wrote more eloquently and luminously [than Heraclitus].

As a reader, I don't feel a story has an obligation to make me happy. I want stories to show me a bigger world than the one I know.

Suddenly I heard the words of Christ and understood them, and life and death ceased to seem to me evil, and instead of despair I experienced happiness and the joy of life undisturbed by death.

If you think you can't do something, you can't. But if you think you can, you may be surprised to discover that you can.