You have to believe in yourself before the world has given you any indication that you should believe in yourself as a writer.

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

It is interesting to note how many of the great scientific discoveries begin as myths.

The source of life’s energy comes from our creator and maker

Contentment - being happy while doing something - and complacency - being happy while doing nothing - are entirely different.

The folkish philosophy of life must succeed in bringing about that nobler age in which men no longer are concerned with breeding dogs, horses, and cats, but in elevating man himself.

You think that enlightenment is something other than what is happening right now. This is your primary mistake.

The amount of information, the amount of incoming that any administration has to deal with today and respond to much more rapidly than ever before, that makes it different.

The later stages of the enlightenment process are trickier, and it is really essential to have a teacher then. You need correction, direction, and most of all you need a master's auric empowerment.

The very word 'secrecy' is repugnant in a free and open society. ... There is little value in ensuring the survival of our nation if our traditions do not survive with it.

Grief should be the instructor of the wise; Sorrow is Knowledge.

The balancing of present wants against the future is really the central problem of ethics.