We often take for granted the very things that most deserve our gratitude.

What we remember from childhood we remember forever - permanent ghosts, stamped, inked, imprinted, eternally seen.

After a certain number of years, our faces become our biographies.

To want to be what one can be is purpose in life.

If we had to say what writing is, we would have to define it essentially as an act of courage.

Is there a word more passionate than passion? Obsession, total immersion, the feeling that everything else doesn't matter.

To imagine the unimaginable is the highest use of the imagination

In saying what is obvious, never choose cunning. Yelling works better.

The power of language, it seems to me, is the only kind of power a writer is entitled to.

Traveling is seeing; it is the implicit that we travel by.

Travelers are fantasists, conjurers, seers - and what they finally discover is that every round object everywhere is a crystal ball: stone, teapot, the marvelous globe of the human eye.

Don't seek to be respected by everyone, rather seek to be worthy of being respected by everyone.

I'm trying to picture you growing up with sisters." "I can do a double French braid in less than three minutes and I've bought more tampons than a thirty-one-year-old man should ever admit to.

To get the medium's magic to work for one's aims rather than against them is to attain literacy.

I see the rodeo's in town again.

I was swinging like a toilet door on a prawn trawler.

If you have to maintain self-esteem by pulling down the standing of others, you are extraordinarily unfortunate.

A rising tide (in the economy) lifts all boats.

I've done all the dumping, which is not a good thing. It's funny, because I married someone who has always done it as well. I believe I met my match.

Ive always been drawn to the ocean.

I came to the conclusion that I am not a fiction writer.