I never feel so alive as when I'm writing and the work is going well.

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

All religions are true but none are literal.

It is foolish to tear one's hair in grief, as though sorrow would be made less by baldness.

At the end of 10 rounds, what you got, unless you have a knockout, of course, and so what you are doing is you are really packaging aggression in its most palatable form.

It was their intention to start twelve new civilizations similar to Atlantis in these locations.

I have made a silent compact with myself not to change a line of what I write. I am not interested in perfecting my thoughts, nor my actions.

It is useless, after all, to complain against inexorable reality.

Trousers can never be too tight. You have to go through a couple of days of pain, then everything stretches out.

When I was very young I was very shy but at the same time I was very open cause I was very curious so I wanted to try many things.

All greatness is unconscious, or it is little and naught.

Stamps God's own name upon a lie just made, To turn a penny in the way of trade.