I think that's great - I just try not to be one of those people. I find the more I think about it, the less free I feel when I write and when I work.

For sometimes you can't help but crave some ruin in what you love.

It is 'where we are' that should make all the difference, whether we believe we belong there or not.

The truth, finally, is who can tell it.

As for what's the most challenging aspect of teaching, it's convincing younger writers of the importance of reading widely and passionately.

So my first book I had no experience having written a book, but each book is a little snapshot of who you are at that moment, accrued all through time, so I accept that.

In this difficult era the most valuable commodity is the unfailing turn of the hours and how they retrieve for us the known harbor of yesterday.

They're not parallel at all. They're my concerns, but how they're expressed particularly on the page is completely divorced from who I am in my street life.

Don’t sanctuaries become prisons, and vice versa, foremost in the mind?

Imagination might not be limitless. It's still tethered to the universe of what we know.

For at some point, each of us will be asked to embody what we feel and know.

Don't get hung up on the size. If you feel bad about yourself because a 12 is what fits, take a Sharpie, and write '6' on the label.

Florida has been really cool to us. This is our first big club tour, and Pennywise has been really nice.

Some are trapped in boxes of pea-sized Christianity, full of myths about missions that rob them of incentive to care about the unreached

When there's no difference, there's no time, no world, no separativity - and there's no you ... nor is there an I.

Daddy, I'm always in prayer because part of my brain, through the Holy Spirit, is in constant communication with Heaven [God]. My mouth is for talking to people.

I'm trying not to let the anger and the violence that erupt take over my life. I guess it comes with the growing process, I don't know. A little mellowing.

I got more bands and went on the road and turn down more movies than you would believe.

art is exposure. And until you've developed a degree of maturity to handle that knowledge, you are revealing what other people keep hidden.

Disordered love always leads to misery and breakdown. The only way to 'reorder' our loves is to love God supremely.

Grandeur and beauty are so very opposite, that you often diminish the one as you increase the other. Variety is most akin to the latter, simplicity to the former.