I'm a fifty-three-year-old writer who can remember being a ten-year-old writer and who expects someday to be an eighty-year-old writer.

I was raised Baptist, and I like the fact that I got my conscience installed early.

All that you touch You Change. All that you Change Changes you. The only lasting truth is Change. God is Change.

In order to rise From its own ashes A phoenix First Must Burn.

To be led by a fool is to be led by the opportunists who control the fool.

Drowning people Sometimes die Fighting their rescuers.

Kindness eases change Love quiets fear

When your rage is choking you, it is best to say nothing.

We're all capable of climbing so much higher than we usually permit ourselves to suppose.

There is no end To what a living world Will demand of you.

Be who you are and not who someone else thinks you ought to be.

Let me tell you: the only way to get rid of dragons is to have one of your own.

Oh God, let me not be cured of love, but let my passion grow! Let me love for love's sake!

God knows I've got so many frailties myself, I ought to be able to understand and forgive them in others. But I don't.

How do you learn if they don't make mistakes? It's good to make mistakes but not that many.

The physical vanity of the diet-and-exercise obsessive is recast as the pursuit of a kind of ritual purity, hedged about with taboos and guilt trips and mysticized by yoga.

Rappers aren't the really rich ones. We all have nice houses with studios and cars, but you need a piece of someone's business to be super wealthy.

I don't think about relatability (when writing), I think about the heart of the character.

Some clergymen make a motto, instead of a theme, of their texts.

It is important to have someone that supports you and encourage you, someone that makes you feel that you are unstoppable, that you can do anything in the world because you have him.

Their spirits and their visions are embodied in their craft. And so is mine. It's not Jane Saw Puff. But the clarity of Jane Saw Puff is precious to me.