Daydreaming had started me on the way; but story writing once I was truly in its grip, took me and shook me awake.

A good snapshot stops a moment from running away.

The excursion is the same when you go looking for your sorrow as when you go looking for your joy.

My continuing passion is to part a curtain, that invisible veil of indifference that falls between us and that blinds us to each other's presence, each other's wonder, each other's human plight.

Southerners love a good tale. They are born reciters, great memory retainers, diary keepers, letter exchangers . . . great talkers.

Insight doesn't happen often on the click of the moment, like a lucky snapshot, but comes in its own time and more slowly and from nowhere but within.

No art ever came out of not risking your neck.

it doesn t matter if it takes a long time getting there; the point is to have a destination.

The events in our lives happen in a sequence in time, but in their significance to ourselves they find their own order the continuous thread of revelation.

We are the breakers of our own hearts

People are mostly layers of violence and tenderness wrapped like bulbs, and it is difficult to say what makes them onions or hyacinths.

Fate is a given, destiny is what we do with it

My relationship with my body has changed. I used to consider it as a servant who should obey, function, give pleasure. In sickness, you realise that you are not the boss. It is the other way around.

Don't neglect the gold in your own back yard.

As the rain soaks into the ground, so pray the Lord to let his gospel soak into your soul.

Remember, when incited to slander, that it is only he among you who is without sin that may cast the first stone.

Everyone has dated or been with a person who is obsessed with their work, and it's immensely frustrating. You're like, "I'm right here! I'm a person! I'm interesting, too!"

The ingratitude of the world can never deprive us of the conscious happiness of having acted with humanity ourselves.

If you want to study writing, read Dickens

We are as gods and might as well get good at it.

Look at all these pigeons, think they can just trust us humans? You can't trust us humans!