In grammar school I read 'Act One' by Moss Hart, and being a playwright struck me as the most magical and romantic career anyone could have... But I never did write a play.

Language is the writer's only tool - we really don't have anything else - but our language contains within it our entire experience of the world.

We are surrounded by story.

A good writer sells out everybody he knows, sooner or later.

Guilt is glorious when it's well earned.

Heightism is the last unchecked prejudice.

The writing itself is the thing that generates stories for me.

When I'm not writing, I can't make sense of out anything. I feel the need to make some sense and find some order, and writing fiction is the only way I've found that seems to begin to do that.

I'd like to be better at short, snappy answers.

Without explaining why, and, most of all, without naming other authors or books, I can only say my novels are influenced by love and death.

We are at the mercy of time, and for all the ways we are remembered, a sea of things will be lost. But how much is contained in what lingers!

Loving God is laying down your life in service to the Creator so that He can give it back to you.

I love California

Caution! Be very careful of false, meaningless, self-contradictory, and not even very funny warnings, like this one.

You're not going to see a new Bernard Hopkins. I'm too old for that crap. I think what you will see is something different that I know I am capable of doing.

What concerns me now is that my life be a beautiful, powerful, in a word, a complete life of its kind.

Most songs come from being attentive. Attentive to life, attentive to scripture, attentive to your heart. Pay attention!

Freedom is not the right to do as you please, but the liberty to do as you should.

I'm in a wild mood tonight. I want to go dance in the foam. I hear the banshees calling.

Everything I say is 95% truthful.

If your gonna play with rattlesnakes, you better know what rattlesnakes do.