Soul-to-soul contact sweeps through, like a tsunami, leaving in its wake just this: unconditional surrender and overwhelming gentleness.

Like Salvador Dali’s paintings of watches melting in the sand, time wanders at its own curious pace whenever you’re on vacation in a foreign country.

Find a way to learn something from every disappointment.

Barely halfway back, exhaustion sets in. What if I don’t make it? An edge of panic gets intercepted by a calmer inner voice: Look behind you.

Out here on the water, it’s a fine line between feeling in control and losing it altogether.

Instead of falling, I am dancing with the wind.

Flip a coin. Life or death. Heads or tails. You never know.

If there’s a takeaway from working here, it’s an understand that, as bioorganisms, we are a walking time bomb programed for cellular self-destruction. Not if, when.

Lucid dreams often feel like this—as if you are observing yourself from a point over your shoulders-arm flexed, hands curving around the boom, breathing, in three dimensional silence.

There are two kinds of special events: planned and unplanned.

Inside, my spirit is sparkling like foam on the crest of a wave at high tide under a full moon.

Whatever Jesus lays His hands upon, lives. If He lays is hands upon a marriage, it lives. If He is allowed to lay His hands on the family, it lives.

Everybody has a gun in their car in Detroit.

I write and read with the assumption that literature contains knowledge of human experience that is not available otherwise.

One has always had a childhood, whatever one becomes.

I honestly think that in order to be a writer you have to learn to be reverent. If not, why are you writing? Why are you here?

This is worse than Hollywood, he thought. A girl comes in with a pork chop and I write a song for her.

Photography is the power of observation, not the application of technology.

Anthropologists are great at novelistic observations. I would be thrilled if this novel would encourage anthropologists to write what they see in fictional form.

In 10,000 years you will not regret anything you didn’t have or do in this life.

It's always hard as an actor I think to be just on the set and have the kind of confidence to be like, 'Yeah, I did that. That went perfectly. That's great.' That's more confidence than I have.