Prayer as focus is not a way of limiting what can be seen; it is a habit of attention brought to bear on all that is.

I don't write about what I know: I write in order to find out what I know.

People come and go in life, but they never leave your dreams. Once they're in your subconscious, they are immortal.

We only store in memory images of value. To write about one's life is to live it twice, and the second time is both spiritual and historical.

Maybe being oneself is always an acquired taste.

Memory is, first, a captivating mystery.

Fundamentally, [prayer] is a position, a placement of oneself.

No memoirists writes for long without experiencing an unsettling disbelief about the reliability of memory, a hunch that memory is not, after all, just memory.

True memoir is written, like all literature, in an attempt to find not only a self but a world

Writing is so hard. And then, sometimes, it is so bewilderingly easy.

A careful first draft is a failed first draft

We travel not just to see the beauty of new places but to see our own beauty in a new environment.

But in high school the business of irrevocable choices began. Doors slipped shut with a faint locking click that was only heared clearly in the dreams of later years.

He had refused fancy clothes or makeup for this interview. His philosophy was that death should to be embarrassing

If an incompetent chieftain is removed, seldom do we appoint his highest-ranking subordinate to his place

You can't pay for healthcare if we're sending a trillion dollars a year to dictators.

Children's books are often seen as the poor relation of literature. But children are just as demanding as adult readers, if not more so. I should know. I'm a children's writer myself.

What God gives in answer to our prayers will always be the thing we most urgently need, and it will always be sufficient.

Of a life of luxury the fruit is luxury, whether in agriculture, or commerce, or literature, or art.

Your circumstances don't dictate your future. ... Your circumstances don't limit you.

I spend my time sitting in train stations, parks, parking lots, cafes, just looking at people - eavesdropping, basically. I'm vulnerable to all of it.