Secrets are like pregnancies hereabouts. You can hide them for a while but then they will start screaming.

There's solace in the thought that I will never finish missing her.

There is no remedy for death--or birth--except to hug the spaces in between. Live loud. Live wide. Live tall.

To ask a novelist to talk about his novels is like asking somebody to cook about their dancing.

These are the stories that we tell ourselves and only ourselves, and they are better left unshared.

...crushed between the fears of going forward and the dread of going back.

Try pitching a story of happiness to your editors and their toes are going to curl up.

Retiring from writing is not to retire from life, but retiring from writing is to avoid the inevitable bitterness which a writing career is bound to deliver as its end product, in almost every case.

My father had osteomyelitis-his left arm was withered between his elbow and his shoulder ... . But the amputation of a Stone Age man called Leaf, a stoneworker, does not relate to my father at all.

I felt that, in some ways, my novels lacked heart because of the distance between me and the subject matter. But no one wants to read a book based on good health, a happy upbringing, a long marriage.

Free drinks have no carbs.

I always seem to have a vague feeling that he is a Satan among musicians, a fallen angel in the darkness who is perpetually seeking to fight his way back to happiness.

I don't exaggerate - I just remember big.

If one attempts to achieve deity or to have the holy, he is thrown back; he is refused. His language is taken from him. He can no longer even communicate. That's the Tower of Babel.

As an actress I find the most enjoyable part of acting is really just to please the director. I just want to please my director.

Hope is a contraband passed from hand to hand and story to story.

We lost the American colonies because we lacked the statesmanship to know the right time and the manner of yielding what is impossible to keep.

The person who fails the most wins.

Cease-fire is important, but it can last only for a very, very, very short time.

God will honor the preaching that honors Christ, but abandon the pulpit that abandons Him.