I started realising that the themes running through all of my novels were really haunting and obsessing me about my own life.

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

In my experience, there’s no secret to accomplishing almost any goal worth pursuing.

Better to live under one tyrant a thousand miles away, than a thousand tyrants one mile away.

I want the French people to respect values that allow each individual to practice his or her faith, but in the frame of our common rules of secularism.

Islam has always been a part of America’s story.... And since our founding, American Muslims have enriched the United States.

The best advice I have been given is to live in the moment, as cliché as that sounds. It's crazy.

For me music is so passionate. I have to give it my all every time I go onstage.

In a few short years you might have to become a scuba diver and go hundreds of feet underwater - It will be the last refuge of pure aura and power on our planet, the oceans' depths.

A poet is a time mechanic not an embalmer.

Common sense should tell us that positively reinforcing sadistic behavior, as these games do, cannot be good for our children.

The stats win nothing. I'm still sexy. I'm still great.