Obviously, computers have made differences. They have fostered the development of spaceships- as well as a great increase in junk mail.

The hardest thing was learning to write. I was 13, and the only writing I had done was for Social Studies. It consisted of copying passages right out of the encyclopedia

Writing is revision. All prose responds to work.

Don't worry about being worried. You're heading out on an adventure and you can always change your mind along the way and try something else.

You do the right thing even if it makes you feel bad. The purpose of life is not to be happy but to be worthy of happiness.

among a coward's weapons, cynicism is the nastiest of all

The combination of domesticity and wildness - that's a deep expression

Things were here before you and will be here after you're gone. The geographic features, especially, give you a sense of your own place in the world and in time

I know that to write you have to have stories you want to tell. You have to keep your mind alive, and you have to work hard.

Public education rests precariously on the skill and virtue of the people at the bottom of the institutional pyramid.

In order to go on with our lives, we are always capable of making the ominous into the merely strange.

In the monastery,  you are always in some kind of a situation where you are pressured so that your worst qualities come up. But you actually want that to happen so you can deal with them

Do things that make you happy within the confines of the legal system.

What is the point of roaming the world when it's the same misery everywhere?

Life is about juggling obligations, Valerie. You need to study smarter, not harder.

Walking next to Talent, she felt the singular, cozy comfort that steals upon one who is with a good friend.

Time is the devourer of all things.

Maybe money can't buy love - but it can get you practically everything else.

People almost always imagine that life is going to be better in town and that the streets of the town are paved with gold.

It's very strange that the people you love are often the people you're most cruel to.