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

No one tells you that your life is effectively over when you have a child: that you're never going to draw another complacent breath again... or that whatever level of hypochondria and rage you'd learned to repress and live with is going to seem like the good old days.

I devoured books like a person taking vitamins, afraid that otherwise I would remain this gelatinous narcissist, with no possibility of ever becoming thoughtful, of ever being taken seriously.

Clutter and mess show us that life is being lived...Tidiness makes me think of held breath, of suspended animation... Perfectionism is a mean, frozen form of idealism, while messes are the artist's true friend. What people somehow forgot to mention when we were children was that we need to make messes in order to find out who we are and why we are here.

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.

Radical self-care is what we've been longing for, desperate for, our entire lives-friendship with our own hearts.

But you don't always get what you want;,you get what you get