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

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.

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

Open your hearts. Deep inside ourselves, we are all one and the same.

It's a sad day when you find out that it's not accident or time or fortune, but just yourself that kept things from you.

Our whole life is startlingly moral. There is never an instant's truce between virtue and vice.

I don't have fights with actors. In absolute honesty, I've never fought with any actor ever.

There are many things in this life capable of throwing people off course - the death of someone close, the loss of income or health, the realisation that cherished hopes cannot always be fulfilled

The higher the hair, the closer to god.

It's an earnings-driven market. The big question is whether the flow of earnings can rescue the market from the twin dreadnoughts of higher oil and interest rates.

I am in a key moment. I kind of understand that I have to use my work more completely without being ashamed.

There must be Religion. Otherwise the poor would murder the rich.

Silence is God's language, and it's a very difficult language to learn.

Give death a better name or die trying.