Fundamentally, [prayer] is a position, a placement of oneself.

I don't write about what I know: I write in order to find out what I know.

People come and go in life, but they never leave your dreams. Once they're in your subconscious, they are immortal.

Prayer as focus is not a way of limiting what can be seen; it is a habit of attention brought to bear on all that is.

We only store in memory images of value. To write about one's life is to live it twice, and the second time is both spiritual and historical.

Maybe being oneself is always an acquired taste.

Memory is, first, a captivating mystery.

No memoirists writes for long without experiencing an unsettling disbelief about the reliability of memory, a hunch that memory is not, after all, just memory.

True memoir is written, like all literature, in an attempt to find not only a self but a world

Writing is so hard. And then, sometimes, it is so bewilderingly easy.

A careful first draft is a failed first draft

To be wrecked begins with an experience that pulls you out of your comfort zone and self-centeredness, whether you want it or not.

Heaven deliver us, what's a poet? Something that can't go to bed without making a song about it.

There are two things that bestow consequence; great possession, or great debts.

It's not enough to hate your enemy. You have to understand how the two of you bring each other to deep completion.

Everyone is born with genius, but most people only keep it a few minutes.

Mankind's expectations have to be greater than ourselves and that the further out there we go, the more we find out that it's about you and me.

An opera may be allowed to be extravagantly lavish in its decorations, as its only design is to gratify the senses and keep up an indolent attention in the audience.

A state of negative energy means that you are essentially getting something for nothing.

Pakistan is running away from talks which will be held only when we get reply. Time available is only tonight.

I like the term 'misunderstood.' But I am a bit of a bad boy.