All of us, writers and non-writers alike, have incredible well-springs of personal experience and history. And we also have imagination - which I think is a kind of human miracle.

One thing I am learning is to slow down. Multitasking is great, but I when try to do everything at warp speed I just end up with typos and stress.

I try to find the beauty in things. On dark days, I sit in my armchair looking at clouds and I am awed at how rain is made.

I think that if you just write your characters you end up with something that people can access.

Half of what's wrong with people today is that they ain't got no place to go that makes them peaceful.

One of the things that writers worry about is finding a voice. I don't think it's a thing that you find so much as it is something that comes to you, or that presents itself.

Voice isn't fixed or unmalleable, it adapts to the characters you are creating and the story being told. I suppose in some way that's true in life - a little flexibility goes a long way.

Even if you don't feel like sitting down to write or working on that big proposal, or whatever it is, just show up anyhow and the rest will follow.

I've been writing all my life. Even though I didn't have sort of careerist aspirations as a writer, it was very much my identity.

Fiction writing is an act of imagination, lived experience is secondary in many ways, writing a novel really is all about inventing worlds and people.

The correlations between real life experience and the storylines in novels are never as direct or simple as they might seem.

Music is the language of the heart

I'd choose truth over cake but I'd try to find a way to get both to be honest.

It is a cheap zeal that reserves its passions to combat only the sins and temptations of others.

The desired effect is what you get when you improve your interplanetary funksmanship.

Prayer is essentially a process by which ideals are enabled to become operative in our lives. It may be more than this, but it is at least this.

The man for me is the cherry on the pie. But I'm the pie and my pie is good all by itself. Even if I don't have a cherry.

In human intercourse the tragedy begins, not when there is misunderstanding about words, but when silence is not understood.

Near the end of his life, Henri Matisse's preferred attire was evening wear, by which I mean pajamas.

You had evil inside you, and you indulged it. Men will always indulge it.

Regardless of what you plan on when you fall in love, significant others come and go in your life. Your friends are it. My friends are my everything.