Whether we know it or not, our minds and hearts are populated by all the characters we will ever need - though we may disassemble them and rearrange the parts into composites for variation.

Characterization requires a constant back-and-forth between the exterior events of the story and the inner life of the character.

Compelling characters are not cogs in the machine of your plot; they are human beings to whom the story happens.

An intuitive grasp of your character is formed by exploring scenes of profound emotional import-moments of overwhelming shame, joy, fear, pride, regret, forgiveness.

The problem lies not with genre but with formula, which consists of seeing genre conventions as restrictions rather than mere guidelines, ends in themselves rather than possibilities.

Till I loved I never lived.

If you have a sister and she dies, do you stop saying you have one? Or are you always a sister, even when the other half of the equation is gone?

Hope as evidence of life. Life as evidence of death.

You better have great practices.

Music is the marriage of the feelings of the living to the wisdom of the dead.

When people are taken out of their depths they lose their heads, no matter how charming a bluff they may put up.

Have your life properly aligned with dharma. The technicalities of the movement of the kundalini are easy to master. Dharma is much more complex.

Most people are so frightened of the name of mathematics that they are ready, quite unaffectedly, to exaggerate their own mathematical stupidity.

I was being foolish. An atheist can't stand behind their assertion that God doesn't exist. The stupidest thing I ever could have done was to reject His Truth.

Without meditation, Id probably be dead.