The truth is life is full of joy and full of great sorrow, but you can't have one without the other..

Don't quit. It's very easy to quit during the first 10 years. Nobody cares whether you write or not, and it's very hard to write when nobody cares on….

One of the things I learned about writing a memoir is you can’t drag the reader through everything. Every human life is worth 20 memoirs..

Talent is cheap. What really matters is discipline..

People fascinate the hell out of me. I never get tired of watching people, listening to people. The best part is not getting up in front of people bu….

That was the source of my vanity and my cowardice: always I believed everyone was watching me..

Teaching well draws from the same well that writing draws from: the reserves of compassion and ability to listen and concentrate on another. So I hav….

I read poetry every day. I love the boiled down essence of poetry. I look for poetry in prose. In a way that evocative..

my belief in the sacrament of the Eucharist is simple: without touch, God is a monologue, an idea, a philosophy; he must touch and be touched, the to….

I think the deeper you go into questions, the deeper or more interesting the questions get. And I think that's the job of art..

Years later I would hear my father say the divorce had left him dating his children. That still meant picking us up every Sunday for a matinee and, i….

Somewhere, sometime I'd stopped expecting my father to father..

And I felt more like me than I ever had, as if the years I'd lived so far had formed layers of skin and muscle over myself that others saw as me when….

I think some people see those three numbers 9/ 11 and they walk away. That might be changing now. People are more willing to step into an artistic ex….

I was really surprised at the success of 'House of Sand and Fog,' because it is so awfully dark. Believe it or not, when writing it, I never had the ….

After the dead are buried, after the physical pain of grief has become a permanent wound in the soul, then comes the transcendent and common bond of ….

We receive and we lose, and we must try to achieve gratitude; and with that gratitude to embrace with whole hearts whatever of life that remains afte….

Even a day writing badly for me is 10 times better than a day where I don’t write at all..