A writer starts out, I think, wanting to be a transfiguring agent, and ends up usually just making contact, contact with other human beings. This, unsurprisingly, is not 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.

You have to nourish your creativity for it to flourish...

In the West, it was believed that attitude and ambition saved you. In Africa, we had learned that no one was immune to capricious tragedy.

My thing is when people say Dom Kennedy's music reminds them of L.A., I wanna do that 100 percent because at the end of the day that's all I am.

Backstreet Boys fans don't want to hear the New Kids singing all of their hits. Just like our fans don't want to hear the Backstreet Boys singing all of our hits.

I paint a mountain - I think of its age - the strata formations or what grows on the mountain.

Happiness does away with ugliness, and even makes the beauty of beauty.

The first place to start is on enforcement. We who got the ADA passed did the hard part, the heavy lifting.

Actors love mental disorders, dialects, and corsets. Give them one of the three and they're happy

Always make your needs and expectations known,she used to say. That way no one gets hurt.

People believe what they see.