What was going on inside of me became louder because everything around me became quieter.

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

...having bowed to the inevitability of the dictum that we must eat to live, we should ignore it and live to eat...

I was not 15 anymore, and choices no longer had that same clear, bright edge to them.

Life is not what you wish it to be, rather it’s what you make it.

He's a bully. I love bullies. They have such big, shiny red buttons to push.

All the days that you wake up you have one job and that's to get better, every single day.

I loved playing Jesus in Jesus Christ Superstar. I mean you can't do better than playing God!

When I had all the answers, the questions changed.

I wasn't cocky, just confident; I went to an all black school, a white kid.

I hate a man who skins the land.

Gentlemen, start your engines!