Beauty takes courage. Courage itself takes courage.

This is why I read novels: so I can escape my own unrelenting monologue.

Write the book you want to read, the one you cannot find.

Open a book this minute and start reading. Don’t move until you’ve reached page fifty. Until you’ve buried your thoughts in print. Cover yourself with words. Wash yourself away. Dissolve.

Go for long walks, indulge in hot baths, Question your assumptions, be kind to yourself, live for the moment, loosen up, scream, curse the world, count your blessings, Just let go, Just be.

There are chapters in every life which are seldom read and certainly not aloud.

Bookish people, who are often maladroit people, persist in thinking they can master any subtlety so long as it's been shaped into acceptable expository prose.

nothing she did or said was quite what she meant but still her life could be called a monument shaped in a slant of available light and set to the movement of possible music

Anyone's childhood can be an act of disablement if rehearsed and replayed and squinted at in a certain light. . .

Words are our life. We are human because we use language. So I think we are less human when we use less language.

The scolding voice is her own, so abrasive and quick, yet so powerless to move her.

My background was in graphic design, but when I was doing it, it was all hand-drawn stuff, not computers.

Conservatives are more religious than liberals--although there is no evidence that they're nicer people because of it.

Feminism is built on believing women's accounts of sexual use and abuse by men.

In Zen we study the will. We learn how to cultivate it, to accumulate will. We use it to direct our actions, and we don't overuse it or abuse it - that's a waste.

I knew what leukemia and lymphoma were, but I had never heard of multiple myeloma.

There is nothing more dread and more shameless than a woman who plans such deeds in her heart as the foul deed which she plotted when she contrived her husband's murder.

Aping urbanity, Oozing with vanity, Plump as a manatee, Faking humanity, Intellectual inanity, Journalistic calamity, Fox Noise insanity, You're a profanity, Hannity.

I have an ego like anybody else, but I don't need to be stoked by going before the public all the time.

For me, there's always a huge attraction in playing real people. But with it comes an incredible sense of responsibility because you're playing a real person in a real event.

Leftovers in their less visible form are called memories. Stored in the refrigerator of the mind and the cupboard of the heart.