Our minds have a tendency to wander. To duck and feint and keep us at a slight remove from the moment at hand.

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

Your dream doesn't have an expiration date.Take a deep breath and try again....

The idea, which constitutes the actual being of the human mind, is not simple, but compounded of a great number of ideas.

Generosity isn't an act. It's a way of life.

I am not responsible for all the journalists in the past that have told lies.

Ignorant kindness may have the effect of cruelty; but to be angry with it as if it were direct cruelty would be an ignorant unkindness.

The opinion of the majority is not lightly to be rejected; but neither is it to be carelessly echoed.

I sometimes think that theatre is a torture.

And I realize how useless wails are and how gratuitous melancholy is.

Time is the shower of Danae; each drop is golden.