The funny thing is, about the time I let go of any aspiration toward worldly success, that's about the time I started writing decent work.

Somewhere along the way America became a giant mall with a country attached.

It took me 10 years to write a story that pleased me - that I could look at after it was published and not cringe.

It is sort of weird being honored for the worst day of your life.

Late bloomer' is another way of saying 'slow learner.

By the end of the first decade of writing, I considered myself a confirmed failure in the eyes of the world.

I never listen to music when I'm writing.

Americans are incredibly polite as long as they get what they want.

There was no such thing as perfection in this world, only moments of such extreme transparency that you forgot yourself, a holy mercy if there ever was one.

If you could figure out how to live with family then you'd gone a long way toward finding your peace.

I kept going back while I was writing the novel - which never sold, may it rest in peace - and by the time it was finished I had too many connections to Haiti to walk away.

Human mind is the most unreliable thing in the universe. So control it.

It belongs to the self-respect of intellect to pursue every tangle of thought to its final unravelment.

Mindfulness was experienced as not holding onto the past, the future, or 'nowness:' but relaxing into the immediacy of whatever was happening.

In the history of the collective as in the history of the individual, everything depends on the development of consciousness.

You fall in love with your heart; you fall out of love with your head.

Will you miss him Holly?” he asked suddenly. [...] “No,” she said. “I will not miss him.” But her eyes told the real story.

As Buddhists, our only task is to keep our room clean.

If we have learned anything in the past quarter century, it is that we cannot Federalize Virtue.

If there is one conclusion to which human experience unmistakably points it is that democratic ends demand democratic methods for their realization.

Life and death, union and separation, follow hard upon one another. Nothing is steadfast but the will, nothing endures but one's achieve­ments. These alone count in life.