It's essential to have sacred time for writing. All successful authors have some daily commitment to keep on-track and moving forward.

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

The disempowered mind believes dreams come true

They call this war a cloud over the land. But they made the weather and then they stand in the rain and say 'Shit, it's raining!

the heart aches through nights—the broken places of neglect

The time has come to give Americans the freedom to purchase health insurance across state lines.

For the first time ever, overweight people outnumber average people in America. Doesn't that make overweight the average then? Last month you were fat, now you're average - hey, let's get a pizza!

The moral of the story is not to listen to those who tell you not to play the violin but stick to the tambourine.

Every actor who has done an action film has a little tiny scar somewhere from that.

Whenever anything is being accomplished, it is being done, I have learned, by a monomaniac with a mission.

Emotional sympathies just dry up and die as we change, and they are as mysterious in friendship as in love. It's a relationship like any other.

If you can prevent one fight among your children, let it be the fight for your attention.