Even a day writing badly for me is 10 times better than a day where I don’t write at all.

I think the deeper you go into questions, the deeper or more interesting the questions get. And I think that's the job of art.

One of the things I learned about writing a memoir is you can’t drag the reader through everything. Every human life is worth 20 memoirs.

I see a lot of marriages crash and burn around me and my wife. I've always been curious about how hard it is to love well and be loved.

Fear is a ghost; embrace your fear, and all you’ll see in your arms is yourself.

As a matter of writing philosophy, if there is one, I try not to ever plot a story. I try to write it from the character's point of view and see where it goes.

I've learned over the years that the writing is smarter and far larger than the writer and his or her own desires for it.

I have always known that writing fiction had little effect on the world; that if it did, young men would not have gone to war after The Iliad.

Somewhere, sometime I'd stopped expecting my father to father.

I read poetry every day. I love the boiled down essence of poetry. I look for poetry in prose. In a way that evocative.

What is art if not a concentrated and impassioned effort to make something with the little we have, the little we see?

Hope could not outlast the breather. Love, however . . . Love was something not even death could conquer, because at the end of everything, even life, he was hers.

Becoming a failure requires no strength

It is the task of the architect to give life a gentler structure.

The best work is a fusion of love and praise.

Wake up in the morning with a specific goal to look forward to.

You know, the Brits had a way of - running an empire. And I don't think America is comfortable with an empire.

Dreamers who regard dreams as important and even vital to success in life will receive and remember helpful dreams.

Go to the battlefield firmly confident of victory and you will come home with no wounds whatsoever.

That's what she [Hillary Clinton] is done with everything all her life. She just makes something good happen, and that's what you need.

But virtue never will be mov'd, Though lewdness court it in a shape of heaven.