Among a hundred windows shining dully in the vast side of greater-than-palace number such-and-such one burns these several years, each night as if the room within were aflame.

You have come to the shore. There are no instructions.

Both art and faith are dependent on imagination; both are ventures into the unknown.

I'm not very good at praying, but what I experience when I'm writing a poem is close to prayer.

Nothing we do has the quickness, the sureness, the deep intelligence living at peace would have.

It's when we face for a moment the worst our kind can do, and shudder to know the taint in our own selves, that awe cracks the mind's shell and enters the heart.

Grief is a hole you walk around in the daytime and at night you fall into it.

In certain ways writing is a form of prayer.

Marvelous Truth, confront us at every turn, in every guise.

One of the obligations of the writer is to say or sing all that he or she can, to deal with as much of the world as becomes possible to him or her in language.

But for us the road unfurls itself, we don't stop walking, we know there is far to go.

How vile and despicable war seems to me! I would rather be hacked to pieces than take part in such an abominable business.

I think the audience should take away that it's okay to be smart, it's okay to be funny and well-learned. You can be from academia and be funny; you don't have to be an idiot.

A town is saved, not more by the righteous men in it, than by the woods and swamps that surround it.

Biblically sound, faithful, and intellectually satisfying theology that will . . . cure many current theological concerns.

Ebonics - or black English, as I prefer to call it - is one of a great many dialects of English. And so English comes in a great many varieties, and black English is one of them.

You can put it another way, of course; you always can.

In China, the social network is a bit different. But I am active there too.

Music is always my great escape... I get to be that wild child and do whatever the hell I want on stage.

I'm extremely blessed to have the extraordinary mother that I have, and I don't mean Diana Ross, I mean the mother. My mom paved a road that didn't exist, as did Oprah.

When the inner child finds a guardian angel, publishers are in heaven.