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

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.

The most reliable path to glory is base brute effort.

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

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.

When trouble arises and things look bad, there is always one individual who perceives a solution and is willing to take command. Very often, that individual is crazy.

Life is not how we lead it. It is how children are born to lead it.

Men are driven by two principal impulses, either by love or by fear.

How do you even start a book you know is going to be your last?

Rather than bringing me closer to others, the time that I spend online isolates me from the most important people in my life, my family, my friends, my neighbourhood, my community.

You think I'm stupid. Stay out of my way. You think I'm stupid.

Some people say I'm a no count, others say I'm no goodBut I'm just a natural born travelin' manDoin' what I think I should, oh yeahDoin' what I think I should.

Don't tell me you're trusting God until you trust Him with your pocketbook.

Erotic love is one of the highest forms of contemplation.

All things are so very uncertain, and that's exactly what makes me feel reassured.