Even if you don't feel like sitting down to write or working on that big proposal, or whatever it is, just show up anyhow and the rest will follow.

One thing I am learning is to slow down. Multitasking is great, but I when try to do everything at warp speed I just end up with typos and stress.

I try to find the beauty in things. On dark days, I sit in my armchair looking at clouds and I am awed at how rain is made.

I think that if you just write your characters you end up with something that people can access.

Half of what's wrong with people today is that they ain't got no place to go that makes them peaceful.

One of the things that writers worry about is finding a voice. I don't think it's a thing that you find so much as it is something that comes to you, or that presents itself.

Voice isn't fixed or unmalleable, it adapts to the characters you are creating and the story being told. I suppose in some way that's true in life - a little flexibility goes a long way.

I've been writing all my life. Even though I didn't have sort of careerist aspirations as a writer, it was very much my identity.

Fiction writing is an act of imagination, lived experience is secondary in many ways, writing a novel really is all about inventing worlds and people.

All of us, writers and non-writers alike, have incredible well-springs of personal experience and history. And we also have imagination - which I think is a kind of human miracle.

The correlations between real life experience and the storylines in novels are never as direct or simple as they might seem.

Knowing the Truth is not based on knowledge, but on being "it".

Theres something alluring and dangerous about him, but comforting and protective. When I think about him, my stomach knots, my heart rate quickens and...and I could go on... -Laney

We arrive in the rooms tangled up in a web of complexity and confusion. Our lives are unmanageable because our minds are unmanageable.” – p. 134

The reason why so many sects hang around airports looking for converts: they know that people there are at their most vulnerable and perplexed, and ready to accept any kind of guidance.

When it comes to finding available men in Minnesota, the odds are good, but the goods are odd.

Isn’t every human being both a scientist and an artist; and in writing of human experience, isn’t there a good deal to be said for recognizing that fact and for using both methods?

A lot of wars are fought between black and whites daily in America. But if it's something I want to be with, the people who started it were black, I wouldn't not get in it.

By increasing the size of the keyhole, today's playwrights are in danger of doing away with the door.

You are the most boring teacher ever." He grinned and gave me a quick kiss on the cheek, just as a knock sounded at the door. "It all depends on what you me to teach you.

People in Russia say that those who do not regret the collapse of the Soviet Union have no heart, and those that do regret it have no brain.