This is home and home is not something you remember, it is something you see every day and every moment.

Every life deserves a certain amount of dignity, no matter how poor or damaged the shell that carries it.

This is a place where grandmothers hold babies on their laps under the stars and whisper in their ears that the lights in the sky are holes in the floor of heaven.

It was a good moment, the kind you would like to press between the pages of a book, or hide in your sock drawer, so you could touch it again.

Don’t worry about what people think, because once it’s all over the people who love you will make you what they want you to be, and the people who don’t love you will, too.

I believe that if we are going to write about life and death, we should not do it from the cheap seats.

Momma kept a garden, which sounds romantic to people who have never held a hoe

I made some friends for life, the way I usually make them. Any jackass can be pleasant company, but if people help you when you're at your worst, that's a friend.

You do not hate the time you waste; it evokes a much more passive emotion than that. You only wish you had it back, like a quarter in an unlucky slot machine.

It is easy to be liked when the world has no jagged edges, when life is electric blankets and peach ice cream. But to be beloved, a man needs a dragon.

These were people... who built redwood decks on their mobile homes and have no idea that smart-aleck Yankees think that is somehow funny. People of the pines. My people.

When you hate somebody...you give him chance mastering your heart.

Be Positive. Be Passionate. Be Persistent. Be Poetic.

Skills can be taught. It's tough to teach heart. Talent is fairly common.

I've written some short stories about my personal experience, but it's not something you can use everywhere. Every novel, every work of fiction, needs its own food.

The hardest thing about leadership is the intimacy it requires.

America's sanctions policy remains intact, and it will remain intact until it changes, if it does, and I'm not sure it will.

Good-byes breed a sort of distaste for whomever you say good-bye to; this hurts, you feel, this must not happen again.

I don't speak, I float in the air wrapped in a sheet I'm not a real person, I'm a ghost trapped in a beat

In your twenties, if you have any amount of complexity in your childhood, or any trauma that you haven't dealt with, it comes out. That's why you have a lot of artists that don't make it through.

These are my daughters, I suppose. But where in the world did the children vanish?