It's easier in an urban world to cast the blame outward. So I've learned a lot about my own process in that way.

I try to remember that the job - as well as the plight, and the unexpected joy - of the artist is to embrace uncertainty, to be sharpened and honed by it.

It is in the thousands of days of trying, failing, sitting, thinking, resisting, dreaming, raveling, unraveling that we are at our most engaged, alert, and alive.

Writing has been my window-flung wide open to this magnificent, chaotic existence-my way of interpreting everything within my grasp.

Everything you need to know about life can be learned from a genuine and ongoing attempt to write

If I dismiss the ordinary—waiting for the special, the extreme, the extraordinary to happen - I may just miss my life.

I do whatever is necessary in order to maintain the equanimity we all need to withstand the disappointment and rejection that are the lot of every writer, no matter where we are in our careers.

The only graceful thing to do is recognize and embrace what is actually happening, rather than fight against it.

My desk is covered with talismans: pieces of rose quartz, wishing stones from a favorite beach.

How do we live the writer's life? There's only one simple answer: 'we write.'

If you are a writer or any kind of artist, if you change something as fundamental as where you live - the way you live - then I think you change the very instrument that is trying to make the art

Only a starving man asks bread from a begger

We have it in our head that if we fill our stomachs, we’ll fill our hearts.

You will suffer and you will hurt. You will have joy and you will have peace.

"Subterranean Homesick Blues" [of Bob Dylan] captures, in word-salad format, life in an encroaching police state.

We're also more affected by aspirational signals in an offline world where it is more difficult to "hide" and thus indirectly increases the influence from others.

Who would come for her?" he snarled, rallying. Behind me, a voice shouted, "Tybalt, King of Cats. My claim precedes yours.

The ocean does something to me that is unexplainable. Just being out there and realizing im alive.

If you can't enjoy the time between golf shots, then you are going to have a pretty difficult life because most of you life is the time spent in-between.

Nature's imagination far surpasses our own.

Foolery, sir, does walk about the orb like the sun; it shines everywhere.