We can't protect ourselves from pain and heartache. In fact, to love - fully, madly, deeply - is the ensure heartache some day.

I try to remember that the job - as well as the plight, and the unexpected joy - of the artist is to embrace uncertainty, to be sharpened and honed by it.

It is in the thousands of days of trying, failing, sitting, thinking, resisting, dreaming, raveling, unraveling that we are at our most engaged, alert, and alive.

Writing has been my window-flung wide open to this magnificent, chaotic existence-my way of interpreting everything within my grasp.

Everything you need to know about life can be learned from a genuine and ongoing attempt to write

If I dismiss the ordinary—waiting for the special, the extreme, the extraordinary to happen - I may just miss my life.

I do whatever is necessary in order to maintain the equanimity we all need to withstand the disappointment and rejection that are the lot of every writer, no matter where we are in our careers.

The only graceful thing to do is recognize and embrace what is actually happening, rather than fight against it.

My desk is covered with talismans: pieces of rose quartz, wishing stones from a favorite beach.

How do we live the writer's life? There's only one simple answer: 'we write.'

If you are a writer or any kind of artist, if you change something as fundamental as where you live - the way you live - then I think you change the very instrument that is trying to make the art

The quite person's mind is a raging ocean!

Let your feelings flow and the scribbled words stay as a sovereign of the moment.

Learn to forgive others so that you can release yourself from being held captive by the very negative thoughts around you.

To the extent that we retain the critical attitudes and destructive elements we have incorporated into our own personalities, we remain undifferentiated from our parents throughout our lifetime.

she prays to feel as powerful as she might if God sang silentwords into her ear and answeredall the rattling questions

I'd never devote a whole record to heartbreak.

Motivation without mobilization means only frustration.

You have 1 billion people using the Internet with 200 million of those now using broadband internet connections, so the Internet has become a powerful network. It can carry calls.

How can you smell this good after the kind of crappy day we've had?" "I sweat perfume. Like all girls.

You know, I was a school rebel. Whatever they said do, I didn't do. I was totally anti-everything.