What interests me is trying to catch the reflection of the human being on the page. I'm interested in how ordinary people live their lives

The hardest thing was learning to write. I was 13, and the only writing I had done was for Social Studies. It consisted of copying passages right out of the encyclopedia

Writing is revision. All prose responds to work.

Don't worry about being worried. You're heading out on an adventure and you can always change your mind along the way and try something else.

You do the right thing even if it makes you feel bad. The purpose of life is not to be happy but to be worthy of happiness.

among a coward's weapons, cynicism is the nastiest of all

The combination of domesticity and wildness - that's a deep expression

Things were here before you and will be here after you're gone. The geographic features, especially, give you a sense of your own place in the world and in time

I know that to write you have to have stories you want to tell. You have to keep your mind alive, and you have to work hard.

Public education rests precariously on the skill and virtue of the people at the bottom of the institutional pyramid.

In order to go on with our lives, we are always capable of making the ominous into the merely strange.

When the mind is free, magic happens.

It’s a lot easier to be angry at someone than it is to tell them you’re hurt.

There's no hope. There's no reason to keep trying. Because you must. This is not hope. Not reason. This is your fate. This is your life, what you must do.

Excess and deficiency are equally at fault.

Forgive me... for my love -for ruining you with my love.

I don't even call it violence when it's in self defense; I call it intelligence.

For a Christian, our fears about the future are rooted in those places where our will differs from God's will.

What happens in committee if the committee functions, more often than not, not every time but more often than not, a bill comes out with bipartisan support.

I can't read sheet music, I have to just listen to it, and then just go for it.