For ritual allows those who cannot will themselves out of the secular to perform the spiritual, as dancing allows the tongue-tied man a ceremony of love.

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?

The psychopathology of the masses is rooted in the psychology of the individual

I postpone death by living by suffering by error by risking by giving by losing.

You cannot write in the chimney with charcoal.

There's a certain amount of sympathy here for the Bush administration's problem, which is they would like to get rid of Saddam Hussein and they would like to have the Kurds autonomous.

...no way through it but through it," I tell myself.

The kind of player who has turned his game around, he used to be lousy and lazy and now he is lazy and lousy.

I have written about 10 books, all just practical encouragement for moms.

Then Park reached up and wrapped one of her red curls around his honey finger. "Back to missing you," he said, letting it go.

Who gets up early to discover the moment light begins?

You must never tell a thing. You must illustrate it. We learn through the eye and not the noggin.