The most reliable path to glory is base brute effort.

Resisting and avoiding pain sucks energy-and time. The more you let yourself feel those minute-and-a-half hells, the quicker you'll start feeling those minute-and-a-half happinesses.

If you need somebody to dig up rocks eight hours a day underwater, call me.

There are still things out there in the universe to contemplate and spend our lives chasing.

I've managed to create intimacy with people I know, and people that I don't know. The longer things stay inside of us, the more we think they are black or tainted, but they're really not.

If you want to write in a mature and interesting way, you have to have sympathy for everyone that's involved.

You see things really different when your father is so intimately, so indisputably in charge of your continued existence on the planet.

When I was growing up, there were no cell phones and no roads into the bush, and so if something happened to your plane, that was serious. Nobody was coming to rescue you.

There's a kind of intimacy that happens between a mother and an only child. Which only gets more intimate when it's between a mother and only daughter.

I'm pretty much of the Shakespearean school. Dialogue is character. How we speak is who we are.

My mom was a social worker. I had a pretty good idea of what the authorities can do when a parent's not around.

Even the purest of souls get ravished and consumed by the most thirsty quintessential desire to possess power.

Courage rides on the coattails of confidence.

Drink because you are happy, but never because you are miserable.

I've never been a great cook.

The bus roared on. I was going home in October. Everybody goes home in October.

Each book is a different staging post on the writer's journey, and each book stands by itself, regardless of the writer's relationship to it.

I am a poor man, but I have this consolation: I am poor by accident, not by design.

The boy grows upward, but the girl grows up.

You have to use what you have to get what you want.

I hated school. After 15, you went off to college if you were good enough. It didn't appeal to me so I left school. I did what everybody did - get a job.