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.

Lighthouses don’t go running all over an island looking for boats to save; they just stand there shining.

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

If you are a writer, or want to be a writer, this is how you spend your days--listening, observing, storing things away, making your isolation pay off. You take home all you've taken in, all that you've overheard, and you turn it into gold. (Or at least you try.)

She felt as if the mosaic she had been assembling out of life's little shards got dumped to the ground, and there was no way to put it back together.

You can either set brick as a laborer or as an artist. You can make the work a chore, or you can have a good time. You can do it the way you used to clear the dinner dishes when you were thirteen, or you can do it as a Japanese person would perform a tea ceremony, with a level of concentration and care in which you can lose yourself, and so in which you can find yourself.

Raising a child, whether or not it is yours, is like Nautilus of the heart and soul.