Once an old woman at my church said the secret is that God loves us exactly the way we are and that he loves us too much to let us stay like this, and I'm just trying to trust that.

I'm very successful, but there are 50,000 general interest books published every year. If you don't want to read mine, there are others.

Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere.

The opposite of faith is not doubt, it’s certainty.

Charles had once remarked that holding onto a resentment was like eating rat poison and waiting for the rat to die.

I used to love to untangle chains when I was a child. I had thin, busy fingers, and I never gave up. Perhaps there was a psychiatric component to my concentration but like much of my psychic damage, this worked to everyone's advantage.

I suspect that he was a child who thought differently than his peers, who may have had serious conversations with grown-ups, who as a young person, like me, accepted being alone quite a lot. I think that this sort of person often becomes either a writer or a career criminal.