Contrary to all those times you've heard a writer confess at a reading that he writes fiction because he is a pathological liar, fiction writing is all about telling the truth.

I breathed the book before I saw it; tasted the book before I read it.

If you want to be a writer, you write. Everybody wants to get published. You gotta play your long game.

Light changes, our eyes blink and see the world from the slightest difference of perspective and our place in it has changed.

When his grandchildren had been little, they had asked if they could hide inside the clock. Now he wanted to gather them and open himself up and hide them among his ribs and faintly ticking heart.

Don't confine truth to fact. Imaginative truth is as powerful, and often enough, more so than fact.

I was just delighted to be a legitimate, for-real published author.

I worry that if whatever pops into your head at any instant immediately goes online, you lose the crucial time for your thoughts to simmer and evolve and build up nuance, depth and empathy.

He smelled cold water and cold intrepid green. Those early flowers smelled like cold water. Their fragrance was not the still perfume of high summer; it was the smell of cold, raw green.

Perhaps, Howard thought, the curtains and murals and pastel angels are a mercy, a dim reflection of things fit for the fragility of human beings.

There are not seven wonders of the world in the eyes of a child. There are seven million.

Now here is the good news: while it's true that none of us can know everything, we can all know more tomorrow than we do today

Our attitudes are the results of who we believe ourselves to be.

Sustained success means making the greatest possible impact over the longest period of time

Don't try to sneak in through the window. Just come boldly onto stage, like come right through the door with your choice. Kill the judge in your head and just take action.

Questions appear real for as long as you consider yourself to be a person. When you realize you are the impersonal presence, all questions vanish.

Poor and afflicted and oppressed people have faces, and we are required to look squarely into them. We can't love what we won't experience.

The movement of life has its rest in its own music.

I get the feeling more and more that religion is being left behind.

That's stupid. You couldn't pay me to go. I'm not oversimplifying it. That's what's going on. I don't think it would be any fun without the drugs. It's a drug party.