poetry is the sung voice of accurate perception.

I don't write about what I know: I write in order to find out what I know.

People come and go in life, but they never leave your dreams. Once they're in your subconscious, they are immortal.

Prayer as focus is not a way of limiting what can be seen; it is a habit of attention brought to bear on all that is.

We only store in memory images of value. To write about one's life is to live it twice, and the second time is both spiritual and historical.

Maybe being oneself is always an acquired taste.

Memory is, first, a captivating mystery.

Fundamentally, [prayer] is a position, a placement of oneself.

No memoirists writes for long without experiencing an unsettling disbelief about the reliability of memory, a hunch that memory is not, after all, just memory.

True memoir is written, like all literature, in an attempt to find not only a self but a world

Writing is so hard. And then, sometimes, it is so bewilderingly easy.

[T]here is really nothing 'out there' to get because, already, within this moment, everything is whole and complete.

Nobody special had come around to replace Duane, and she was moping, going to bed alone every night with a box of Velveeta and a fork.

Figuring out our gifts in life is part of our journey to becoming enlightened human beings.

Your destiny is forged in the fires of your determination

I spent a lot of time in Tower Records. I'm a huge music nerd, and Tower was instrumental to me when I was growing up.

I had a job since I was old enough to work - since I was, like, 14.

The joy he brings to the millions of his countrymen, the grace with which he handles all the adulation and the expectations and his innate humility - all make for a one-in-a-billion individual.

Be ruthless about protecting writing days....althoug h writing has been my actual job for several years now, I still seem to have to fight for time in which to do it.

The most complete seems lacking. Yet in use it is not exhausted.

Contrary to general belief, I do not believe that friends are necessarily the people you like best, they are merely the people who got there first.