Most good fiction also has a character the writer seems to know more deeply than anyone can actually be known in life, but a few unusual writers can make something great without that.

It's usually easier for me to begin writing in a character's voice if that person is different from me in some significant way.

I can't listen to music when I'm writing. I like music best in a car or on the train.

I think that the practice of writing every day was what made me remember that writing doesn't have anything to do with publishing books. It can be totally separate and private - a comforting thought.

I've always been a little bit more of a novel reader than a short story reader. I think the first books that made me want to be a writer were novels.

In America you make your plans and then they happen.

I think, in general, it's better not to respond to reviews of your work.

I like it when someone gives me a new book of poetry by a poet I haven't read.

Research for fiction is a funny thing: you go looking for one piece of information, and find something altogether different.

Alice Munro is a particular kind of short story writer in that she writes long, character-driven short stories.

If somebody says your story is only published because you look nice in the photo, that maybe spurs you on to write.

If you can't stop thinking about it, don't stop working for it.

What you make of yourself and your future is entirely up to you.

Radically accept, release and allow suffering to move through you like a passing storm.

When I was 16... I worked in a pet store. And they fired me because... they had three snakes in there, and one day I braided them.

Well, very splendid and very frightening. But splendid things are often frightening. Sometimes, it's the fright that makes them splendid at all.

Once more it was borne in on him that marriage was not the safe anchorage he had been taught to think, but a voyage on uncharted seas.

In a husband, there is only a man; in a married woman, there is a man, a father, a mother and a woman.

The saving power of the cross does not depend on faith being addded to it; its saving power is such that faith flows from it

The perfection of yoga is to become detached. And the perfection of detachment is to become completely attached, attached to God.

Joy is wealth and love is the legal tender of the soul.