I love poetry, but I find it so difficult to write well.

The most precious love is often the kind that isn't returned, and that is given freely.

Nonfiction ties your hands a bit, and just like writing poetry in rhyme, it can force you to make more brutal decisions in terms of word choice, plot, etc.

I do write fiction, and I find it more difficult, but also more liberating. On the one hand, you can make up the story, but you have to make up the story.

I write one poem a year, usually in January or February.

It's terrible to know that no matter how you try to help your child, his condition will worsen.

I don't believe in God, but I do believe in that chaotic reality, and also this: that none of us knows anything about anything. Period.

People romanticize, I think, this notion of life. But life at all costs is not life, it's ego-extension.

I honestly turned to writing because I didn't know what else to do, and because a friend had gently suggested it.

I do believe that great love brings with it the terror and possibility of great loss.

I think it's more important to concentrate on trying to be, simply, happy. Once you've known deep despair, you feel even more motivated to be as happy as possible. That's how I feel.

The ministry of prayer, if it be anything worthy of the name, is a ministry of ardor, a ministry of unwearied and intense longing after God and after his holiness.

We form our impression not globally, by placing ourselves in the broadest possible context, but locally, by comparing ourselves to people in the same boat as ourselves.

It is impossible to lose your footing while on your knees.

If advertising encourages people to live beyond their means, so does matrimony.

As an actor, you know, I love not being pigeonholed, which is great. No one really knows who I am. So that's a positive.

I smell fear, he said with a quiet intensity. But not nearly enough.

The challenge of screenwriting is to say much in little and then take half of that little out and still preserve an effect of leisure and natural movement

The true effect of genuine politeness seems to be rather ease than pleasure.

We are the shadow cast by real people. And that shadow changes shape as the news cycle changes shape, so you always have fresh dirt to dig in.

Now, aged 50, I'm just poised to shoot forth quite free straight and undeflected my bolts whatever they are.