One is taught by experience to put a premium on those few people who can appreciate you for what you are..

The characters that I create are parts of myself and I send them on little missions to find out what I don’t know yet..

How easy it was to make people happy, when you didn't want or need anything from them..

There are two kinds of people. One kind, you can just tell by looking at them at what point they congealed into their final selves. It might be a ver….

The more you respect and focus on the singular and the strange, the more you become aware of the universal and infinite..

Some things arrive in their own mysterious hour, on their own terms and not yours, to be seized or relinquished forever..

Something's your vocation if it keeps making more of you..

The best antidote I have found is to yearn for something. As long as you yearn, you can't congeal: There is a forward motion to yearning..

Negative people present us with an accelereted personal growth opportunity..

I confess, right at the start, to the doubts - and sometimes outright dreads - that go with me as I climb the stairs to my study in the morning, co….

I'm always aware that I risk being taken for a neurasthenic prima donna when I explain to someone who wants 'just a little' of my time that five minu….

I work continuously within the shadow of failure. For every novel that makes it to my publisher's desk, there are at least five or six that died on t….

If there is such a thing as sin in this world, I think it must be shutting oneself up against hope..

None of us suddenly becomes something overnight. The preparations have been in the making for lifetime..

Good teaching is one-fourth preparation and three-fourths pure theatre..

Actors between plays are like ghosts looking for bodies to inhabit..

Hope does not necessarily have to take an object..

Dreams say what they mean, but they don't say it in daytime language..

I believe that with enough practice and good faith, you can learn to recognize when the work is achieved..

Much of the activity we think of as writing is, actually, getting ready to write..

During the act of writing I have told myself something that I didn't know I knew..