I cry intermittently, like a summer rain. I don't feel racked by the crying; in fact, it hydrates me. Then rage wells up in me, and I want to take a crowbar to all the cars in the neighborhood.

The road to enlightenment is long and difficult, and you should try not to forget snacks and magazines.

If we stay where we are, where we're stuck, where we're comfortable and safe, we die there... When nothing new can get in, that's death.

Perfection is shallow, unreal, and fatally uninteresting.

If you have a body, you are entitled to the full range of feelings. It comes with the package.

He got me a cup of tea with honey, toast with honey, yogurt with honey, like I was John the Baptist with the flu.

The very first thing I tell my new students on the first day of a workshop is that good writing is about telling the truth. We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are. Sheep lice do not seem to share this longing, which is one reason they write so very little. But we do. We have so much we want to say and figure out.