Poetry privileges music and is aesthetically more challenging. Prose privileges information and is emotionally more challenging.

A dysfunctional family is any family with more than one person in it.

Sure the world breeds monsters, but kindness grows just as wild.

Even the best of us are at least part-time bastards.

Ten years, she's dead, and I still find myself some mornings reaching for the phone to call her. She could no more be gone than gravity or the moon.

The words and sentences you take into your body from books are no less sacred and healing than communion. Surely at least one such person lives in your zip code.

In my godless household, poems were the closest we came to sacred speech -- the only prayers said.

I find a great deal of comfort and care in my faith and prayer. I'd sooner do without air than prayer.

When I got sober, I thought giving up was saying goodbye to all the fun and all the sparkle, and it turned out to be just the opposite. That's when the sparkle started for me.

I'm doomed to act like myself, even when it's inconvenient!

I believe in God, but even if you don't, you can believe in a self, the person who is innately who you are. Once you fully become that person, then everything you do will be blessed.

I practice neither black nor white magic.What I do is a technology that I use for my own individual purposes. I don’t strive to be a member of a club.

For me, the good food starts with good product.

Jesus as a concrete historical personality remains a stranger to our time, but His spirit, which lies hidden in His words, is known in simplicity, and its influence is direct.

I just like to build things and do things.

I think that literary forms are losing their capacity to connect people to issues, to the experiences that feel most meaningful to them.

Many people cycle or swim to keep trim. But if swimming is so good for the figure, how do you explain whales?

I do not pretend that all that white men do is properly Christianized.

Be sensitive to the qualities inherent in the medium. Paint honestly and avoid tricks.

Independent of harmony rules, any color 'goes' or 'works' with any other color, presupposing that their quantities are appropriate.

I wanted to be an actor because it gave me the opportunity to express myself in ways I wasn't comfortable expressing myself, as a kid growing up in St. Louis.