Everything you need to know about life can be learned from a genuine and ongoing attempt to write

To forget oneself-to lose oneself in the music, in the moment- that kind of absorption seems to be at the heart of every creative endeavor.

Think of a ballet dancer at the barre. Plie, eleve, battement tendu. She is practicing, because she knows that there is no difference between practice and art. The practice is the art.

The writer’s life requires courage, patience, empathy, openness. It requires the ability to be alone with oneself. Gentle with oneself. To be disciplined, and at the same time, take risks.

the safest place to keep your secrets is to keep them in your mind with a locked tongue

I'm poor and my cat is huge.

Beauty can inspire miracles.

Elements of the heroic exist in almost every individual: it is only the felicitous development of them all in one that is rare.

If you are psychic you can perceive that someone may love you and they can't show it. Someone may seek to harm you and they mask it.

Things don't just happen; things happen just.

Life brings with it strangeness and surprises and upsets

The Church is or should go back to being a community of God's people, and priests, pastors and bishops, who have the care of souls, are at the service of the people of God.

To succeed in business you need to be original, but you also need to understand what your customers want.

In my more pompous moments I like to think of myself as a writer rather than a humorist, but I suppose that's merely the vanity of advancing age.