Talent is cheap. What really matters is discipline.

I think the deeper you go into questions, the deeper or more interesting the questions get. And I think that's the job of art.

One of the things I learned about writing a memoir is you can’t drag the reader through everything. Every human life is worth 20 memoirs.

I see a lot of marriages crash and burn around me and my wife. I've always been curious about how hard it is to love well and be loved.

Fear is a ghost; embrace your fear, and all you’ll see in your arms is yourself.

As a matter of writing philosophy, if there is one, I try not to ever plot a story. I try to write it from the character's point of view and see where it goes.

I've learned over the years that the writing is smarter and far larger than the writer and his or her own desires for it.

I have always known that writing fiction had little effect on the world; that if it did, young men would not have gone to war after The Iliad.

Somewhere, sometime I'd stopped expecting my father to father.

I read poetry every day. I love the boiled down essence of poetry. I look for poetry in prose. In a way that evocative.

What is art if not a concentrated and impassioned effort to make something with the little we have, the little we see?

Perhaps it’s my natural pessimism, but it seems that an awfully large part of travel these days is to see things while you still can.

The Lie which elates us is dearer than a thousand sober truths

The better you know yourself, the better your relationship with the rest of the world.

Positive thought expands the halo of mind energy.

If you have ever been in a real tragic or sad situation, the words that come out are hopelessly inadequate and kind of cliched.

It never does much good to find out why you can't; put your effort into what you can do.

Your mysterious mountains I wish to see closer. May I land my kinky machine?

Genius does not only pertain to the brain, it belongs above all to the heart.

Even as a feminist, my whole life I'd been waiting for a man to love, who could love me. For decades, I'd thought that man would be my father. When I was 25, I met that man and he was my brother.

why couldn't someone , somewhere , want her for her ?