I'm most connected to myself when I'm alone in a room, moving my hand across a page. That's when I feel most like me.

I try to remember that the job - as well as the plight, and the unexpected joy - of the artist is to embrace uncertainty, to be sharpened and honed by it.

It is in the thousands of days of trying, failing, sitting, thinking, resisting, dreaming, raveling, unraveling that we are at our most engaged, alert, and alive.

Writing has been my window-flung wide open to this magnificent, chaotic existence-my way of interpreting everything within my grasp.

Everything you need to know about life can be learned from a genuine and ongoing attempt to write

If I dismiss the ordinary—waiting for the special, the extreme, the extraordinary to happen - I may just miss my life.

I do whatever is necessary in order to maintain the equanimity we all need to withstand the disappointment and rejection that are the lot of every writer, no matter where we are in our careers.

The only graceful thing to do is recognize and embrace what is actually happening, rather than fight against it.

My desk is covered with talismans: pieces of rose quartz, wishing stones from a favorite beach.

How do we live the writer's life? There's only one simple answer: 'we write.'

If you are a writer or any kind of artist, if you change something as fundamental as where you live - the way you live - then I think you change the very instrument that is trying to make the art

Self Help: When you really stop and think about it, is there any other kind?

It is thus more potent, as well as more economical, to disarm the enemy than to attempt his destruction by hard fighting ... A strategist should think in terms of paralysing, not of killing.

Do the atheists in Wisconsin realize they're going to Hell? Did you ask them that?

It has been well over half a century and I'm glad to say we have taken the right path from authoritarianism to democracy and this is a road of no return.

He's not a lad that likes to stand on his feet.

From my point of view, which is the point of view of no illusions, there is only winning and losing. You might as well be a winner.

Scripts are kind of a bare bones type of reading material.

I started playing jazz by slowing down Tal Farlow records and analyzing his runs

The Universe is a masterpiece of abundance.

Bad films gave me the courage to try making a movie