You are going to love some of your characters because they are you or some facet of you, and you are going to hate some of your characters for the same reason.

Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you.

I do not at all understand the mystery of grace - only that it meets us where we are but does not leave us where it found us.

Faith includes noticing the mess, the emptiness and discomfort, and letting it be there until some light returns.

Dogs are the closest we come to knowing the divine love of God on this side of eternity.

... the reason life works at all is that not everyone in your tribe is nuts on the same day. [pp. 65-66]

Sometimes I think that Jesus watches my neurotic struggles, and shakes his head and grips his forehead and starts tossing back mojitos.

Nothing heals us like letting people know our scariest parts: When people listen to you cry and lament, and look at you with love, it's like they are holding the baby of you.

Lighthouses don’t go running all over an island looking for boats to save; they just stand there shining.

I thought the secret of life was obvious: be here now, love as if your whole life depended on it, find your life's work, and try to get hold of a giant panda.

Human lives are hard, even those of health and privilege, and don't make much sense. This is the message of the Book of Job: Any snappy explanation of suffering you come up with will be horseshit.

A writer's role was never just to tell stories, but to create a world to encompass and share with others.

Write what you love. Passion is the key to a good story.

It's political Daddyism and it's as old as demagogues and despotism.

Old houses mended, Cost little less than new before they're ended.

Men feel that cruelty to the poor is a kind of cruelty to animals. They never feel that it is an injustice to equals; nay it is treachery to comrades.

I'm not usually where I think I am. It's kind of spooky.

After my spectacular failures, I could not be satisfied with an ordinary success.

Cartooning is for people who can't quite draw and can't quite write. You combine the two half-talents and come up with a career.

I threw all my pitches over the top which was important for me because my slider was hard to tell from my fastball at release.

I think I'm trying to write truthfully about life, and naturalism, or the way people normally talk in movies, is a convention. It's not the way people talk in life at all.