I wouldn't say we were doing that. I think we probably stopped thinking. Though it took a while to stop thinking.

The key is to get to know people and trust them to be who they are. Instead, we trust people to be who we want them to be - and when they're not, we cry.

Every day I try to do breathing exercises, meditation, and yoga. These things sound awfully cliche, but they help me slow down and try to point to a truth.

I love dogs. They live in the moment and don't care about anything except affection and food. They're loyal and happy. Humans are just too damn complicated.

I lost my virginity when I was 14. And I haven't been able to find it.

Anxiety is part of creativity, the need to get something out, the need to be rid of something or to get in touch with something within.

I understand the self-loathing and the resentment, and the discipline that it takes to sit down in front of a typewriter or computer every single day, whether it's going well or not going well.

I may be learning guitar, but I'll never be able to sing.

I think the real heroic teachers are the ones who work with kids, like my mom and my sister do.

A dream is the mind's way of answering a question it hasn't yet figured out how to ask.

What makes me mad is arrogance, pretension, putting on airs.

Writers are a superior breed. No one else can face so much rejection and still thrive.

They were rather handsome, had been educated in one of the first private seminaries in town,

Stupidity is actually in a way the mark of intelligence - if you're not doing stupid things that defy logic you're probably not taking enough risks.

Motherhood was my career. I'm totally satisfied with that.

A keen sense of humor helps us to overlook the unbecoming, understand the unconventional, tolerated the unpleasant, overcome the unexpected, and outlast the unbearable.

We wish our Christian brothers would be honest and permit us our heroes. We do not deny them theirs.

If you are not willing to take the shame on yourself, you then let it remain on Jesus Christ. You must bear the reproach of your sinful state of indifference, or the cause of our Master must bear it.

He was hiding from his problems in a bottle, something that went against every piece of my nature. Me? I couldnʹt let my problems win without a fight.

I am dismayed to realize that much of the advice I used to parcel out to aspiring writers has passed its sell-by date.

The machinations of ambiguity are among the very roots of poetry.