The problem with God - or at any rate, one of the top five most annoying things about God - is that he or she rarely answers right away.

Becoming a writer is about becoming conscious. When you're conscious and writing from a place of insight and simplicity and real caring about the truth, you have the ability to throw the lights on for your reader. He or she will recognize his or her life and truth in what you say, in the pictures you have painted, and this decreases the terrible sense of isolation that we have all had too much of.

Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave. They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die.

Nothing can be delicious when you are holding your breath.

I’m probably just as good a mother as the next repressed, obsessive-compulsive paranoiac.

The worst time in any writer's life is the two months before publication. ALL writers become mental and pathetic, even those of devout faith, who have some psychological healing to lean up against, and gorgeous lives. All writers think that this time, the jig is up, and they will be exposed as frauds.

Everything was coming together by coming apart . . . It is the most difficult Zen practice to leave people to their destiny, even though it's painful - just loving them, and breathing with them, and distracting them in a sweet way, and laughing with them . . . if something was not my problem, I probably did not have the solution.