I also learned that you didn’t come onto this earth as a perfectionist or control freak. You weren’t born a person of cringe and contraction. You were born as energy, as life, made of the same stuff as stars, blossoms, breezes. You learned contraction to survive, but that was then. You have paid through the nose-paid but good. It is now your turn to reap.

To be a good writer, you not only have to write a great deal but you have to care. You do not have to have a complicated moral philosophy. But a writer always tries, I think, to be a part of a solution, to understand a little about life and to pass this on.

When everything starts going wrong all at once, it is to protect something big and lovely that is trying to get itself born.

I wish I had thrown out the bathroom scale at age 16. Weighing yourself every morning is like waking up and asking Dick Cheney to validate your sense of inner worth.

Your unconscious can't work when you are breathing down its neck.

The worst part about celebrating another birthday is the shock that you're only as well as you are.

There is a door we all want to walk through and writing can help you find it and open it.