I could tell you stories-if only stories could tell what I have in me to tell.

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.

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

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.

God gave us imaginations because that’s one of the ways we can visit the future! Thoughts are transport media!

Not all writers are crazy. Only the ones who are serious enough about their craft.

That's why so much of the music today sounds so much alike, because there's no in-between. So it's kind of nice to still turn some buttons every now and then.

Sing your song. Dance your dance. Tell your tale.

It is unseemly to undress on stage. I won't do that.

We're living in post-nuance online times.

I'd learned a thing or two. Hope strengthens. Fear kills.

Country music... doesn't bend notes in the same way, so I suppose it's very English, really. Even though it's been very Americanized, it feels very close to me, to my roots, so to speak.

If you don't visit the bad neighborhoods, the bad neighborhoods are going to visit you.

If you don't think like a winner, you're not going to be a winner.