I grew up in a house without many books. The books the nuns made us read in school didn't interest me.

In revision, your imagination becomes deeply engaged with your material. It's when you come to know your characters and begin to perceive their motivations and values.

A pure love is a selfless love, but can desire ever be selfless?

The landscape of childhood shapes us as it shapes the characters in our stories. You never forget the sacred places of your childhood.

Drug programs began to turn their attention and money away from prevention and into maintenance. Methadone was cheaper than social workers, I suppose.

A lack of narrative structure, as you know, will cause anxiety.

You lose a wallet or keys or something and you notice in a second, but your life can go missing and you don't even know it.

Every act of loving affirms the goodness of the lover just because he is capable of loving and being loved.

Love is always a surprise and you never get it right.

The purpose of the first draft is not to get it right, but to get it written.

I was reading for understanding. I wanted to do to a reader what Salinger did for me.

I can feel no sentiment of approbation inferior to love.

That liberty [is pure] which is to go to all, and not to the few or the rich alone. (to Horatio Gates, 1798)

The greatest temptations are not those that solicit our consent to obvious sin, but those that offer us great evils masking as the greatest goods.

I could be whatever I wanted to be if I trusted that music that song that vibration of God that was inside of me.

Society is composed of two great classes: those who have more dinners than appetite and those who have more appetite than dinners.

I know that life is really finding the right relationship between yourself and God.

People who plan their life when they're 18 years old and say, "This is my life plan," would generally be surprised and maybe disappointed.

Ambition or contentment? This simple question led me back to a more balanced view of life and put me in touch with the Me I used to know.

I couldn't see passion as a bad thing.

The music I do is food... that will be your dinner.