You have to make mistakes to find out who you aren't. You take the action, and the insight follows: You don't think your way into becoming yourself.

Life is like a recycling center, where all the concerns and dramas of humankind get recycled back and forth across the universe. But what you have to offer is your own sensibility, maybe your own sense of humor or insider pathos or meaning. All of us can sing the same song, and there will still be four billion different renditions.

Good writing is about telling the truth.

Or you might shout at the top of your lungs or whisper into your sleeve, "I hate you, God." That is a prayer too, because it is real, it is truth, and maybe it is the first sincere thought you've had in months.

If our lives are made up of a string of a thousand moments, at some of those moments we look a lot more spiritually evolved than at others.

I don't have any romantic views of parenting. Every step of the way it's really hard. It's a dangerous world, physically and psychologically.

We write to expose the unexposed. Most human beings are dedicated to keeping that one door shut. But the writer's job is to see what's behind it, to see the bleak unspeakable stuff, and to turn the unspeakable into words - not just into any words but if we can, into rhythm and blues. You can't do this without discovering your own true voice, and you can't find your true voice and peer behind the door and report honestly and clearly to us if your parents are reading over your shoulder.