The amount of horror one used to hear about in one village could be quite extreme. But one might not have heard about all the other villages' horrors at the same time.

I was a late bloomer. But anyone who blooms at all, ever, is very lucky.

Poets are like steam valves, where the ordinary feelings of ordinary people can escape and be shown.

Take your vitamins. Exercise. Just work to love yourself as much as you can - not more than the people around you but not so much less.

The older I get, the more I see the power of that young woman, my mother.

Writing or making anything-a poem, a bird feeder, a chocolate cake-has self-respect in it. You're working. You're trying. You're not lying down on the ground, having given up.

There is something in me maybe someday to be written; now it is folded, and folded, and folded, like a note in school.

I did not know him, I knew my idea of him.

The older I get, the more I feel.

I have learned to get pleasure from speaking of pain

I didn't have time to sit down and look at the work of a year and choose what to type.

Life really is a story, and every story comes to an end. At the same time, it seems we all leave in the middle of our own stories. It's who we become that gives the story body, form and meaning.

-"you dress to impress"-"No Angel, I undress to impress

Everything you heard about me is true. . . . I am not a free marketer. . . . I believe in the heavy hand of government.

Doing a movie is a stressful thing. You spend months of you life focusing into that one project, and I want to make sure I do something I really like or I'm really passionate about.

Now there's a seven-day waiting period to buy a gun. Who can stay mad that long?

Brigan threw his head back and smiled at the sky. "Well said, Lady. The world may be falling to pieces, but at least the lot of us can have a bath.

Since my house burned down I now own a better view of the rising moon.

Everything you do is autobiographical. Yeah, I grew up in a town called Redding and I had older brothers and sisters so it's all my memories of growing up.

The reader can't take much for granted in a fiction where the scenery can eat the characters.