My dad died when I was 23. His death was sudden and shocking - the result of a car crash - and I never got to say goodbye.

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

I am planting a tree in this bomb crater to remind us that in the midst of death, there is life... and hope.

Snatching my hand in the death grip of his fingers, he pulls me off the wall to line his chest, closing his body around me in a muscular cage which smells of leather and soap.

For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication.

Christ demands first place. There's no room on the throne of your heart for two gods.

Dare you see a Soul at the White Heat?

When you come across someone colorful and vibrant maybe in the present it isn't so interesting, but, in the past, it sheds a wonderful light onto living life.

It's too late to correct it: when you've once said a thing, that fixes it, and you must take the consequences.

Life is the power that's greater than I can ever comprehend.

I can't stand black guys. I would never touch one. It's gross.

As a part of preparing those lawsuits, learning about those lawsuits, I learned about the various nuclear issues in parts of the nuclear production process I guess you'd say.