I suggest to my students that they write under a pseudonym for a week. That allows young men to write as women, and women as men. It allows them a lot of freedom they don't have ordinarily.

Memory blurs, that's the point. If memory didn't blur you wouldn't have the fool's courage to do things again, again, again, that tear you apart.

Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another's skin, another's voice, another's soul.

I never change, I simply become more myself.

How lovely this world is, really: one simply has to look.

Our enemy is by tradition our savior, in preventing us from superficiality.

Read widely, and without apology. Read what you want to read, not what someone tells you you should read.

Night comes to the desert all at once, as if someone turned off the light.

Keep a light, hopeful heart. But ­expect the worst.

See, people come into your life for a reason. They might not know it themselves, why. You might not know it. But there's a reason. There has to be

Be your own editor/critic. Sympathetic but merciless!

If you want to be a writer, write a little bit every day. Pay attention to the world around you. Stories are hiding, waiting everywhere. You just have to open your eyes and your heart.

Be proud of your people when you don't have to be ashamed of any of its social classes.

An ingenuous mind feels in unmerited praise the bitterest reproof.

When things are very real and honest, they don't go away.

We are told to let our light shine, and if it does, we won't need to tell anybody it does. Lighthouses don't fire cannons to call attention to their shining- they just shine.

I don't judge in my books. I don't have to have the antagonist get shot or the protagonist win. It's just how it comes out. I'm just telling a story.

I write arrangements. Im sort of a wannabe composer.

There is no lonelier person than the one who lives with a spouse with whom he or she cannot communicate.

Love clamors far more incessantly and passionately at a closed gate than an open one!

I've never done it before. Sometimes it's tough. I don't have any peripheral vision.