If you want to be a writer, you write. Everybody wants to get published. You gotta play your long game.

I breathed the book before I saw it; tasted the book before I read it.

Light changes, our eyes blink and see the world from the slightest difference of perspective and our place in it has changed.

When his grandchildren had been little, they had asked if they could hide inside the clock. Now he wanted to gather them and open himself up and hide them among his ribs and faintly ticking heart.

Contrary to all those times you've heard a writer confess at a reading that he writes fiction because he is a pathological liar, fiction writing is all about telling the truth.

Don't confine truth to fact. Imaginative truth is as powerful, and often enough, more so than fact.

I was just delighted to be a legitimate, for-real published author.

I worry that if whatever pops into your head at any instant immediately goes online, you lose the crucial time for your thoughts to simmer and evolve and build up nuance, depth and empathy.

He smelled cold water and cold intrepid green. Those early flowers smelled like cold water. Their fragrance was not the still perfume of high summer; it was the smell of cold, raw green.

Perhaps, Howard thought, the curtains and murals and pastel angels are a mercy, a dim reflection of things fit for the fragility of human beings.

Given the opportunity to help us with our dreams, the Universe does not disappoint.

The elevator to success broke a long time ago, the problem is too many people are too lazy to take the stairs.

Keep quiet and people will think you a philosopher.

I can think. I can sleep. I can move. I can ride my bike. I can dream.

The cultivation of compassion is no longer a luxury, but a necessity, if our species is to survive.

Every good journalist is aware that his trade may one day go the way of phrenology-and, what's more, the population will hardly protest the extinction.

People say children from broken homes have it hard, but the children of charmed marriages have their own particular challenges.

There really is no such thing as failure. There is only the rearrangement of plans and surrender of ego.

If the preaching of our ministers and the practice of our parishioners do not have the same effect on people that Jesus had, then we must not be declaring the same message that Jesus did.