You can get the monkey off your back, but the circus never leaves town.

The depth of the feeling continued to surprise and threaten me, but each time it hit again and I bore it...I would discover that it hadn't washed me ….

A whole lot of us believers, of all different religions, are ready to turn back the tide of madness by walking together, in both the dark and the lig….

Looking back on the God my friend believed in, he seems a little erratic, not entirely unlike her father - God as borderline personality..

We are not here to see through one another, but to see one another through..

Prayer is talking to something or anything with which we seek union, even if we are bitter or insane or broken. (In fact, these are probably the best….

My gratitude for good writing is unbounded; I’m grateful for it the way I’m grateful for the ocean..

I honestly think that in order to be a writer you have to learn to be reverent. If not, why are you writing? Why are you here?.

Just don't pretend you know more about your characters than they do, because you don't. Stay open to them. It's teatime and all the dolls are at the ….

I just can't get over how much babies cry. I really had no idea what I was getting into. To tell you the truth, I thought it would be more like getti….

I still encourage anyone who feels at all compelled to write to do so. I just try to warn people who hope to get published that publication is not al….

We want a sense that an important character, like a narrator, is reliable. We want to believe that a character is not playing ages or being coy or be….

Writing takes a combination of sophistication and innocence; it takes conscience, our belief that something is beautiful because it is right..

Joy is the best makeup. But a little lipstick is a close runner-up..

For some of us, books are as important as almost anything else on earth. What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper u….

When we're dealing with the people in our family - no matter how annoying or gross they may be, no matter how self-inflicted their suffering may appe….

I was raised by my parents to believe that you had a moral obligation to try and help save the world..

You must not inflict life on someone who will be resented..

Can you imagine the hopelessness of trying to live a spiritual life when you’re secretly looking up at the skies not for illumination or direction, b….

Summer nearly does me in every year. It's too hot and the light is unforgiving and the days go on way too long..

Because this business of becoming conscious, of being a writer, is ultimately about asking yourself, How alive am I willing to be?.