My mother's eyes were large and brown, like my son's, but unlike Sam's, they were always frantic, like a hummingbird who can't quite find the flower but keeps jabbing around.

Try to write in a directly emotional way, instead of being too subtle or oblique. Don't be afraid of your material or your past. Be afraid of wasting any more time obsessing about how you look and how people see you. Be afraid of not getting your writing done.

You don't always have to chop with the sword of truth. You can point with it too.

Dogs are the closest we come to knowing the divine love of God on this side of eternity.

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

I remember staring at my son endlessly when he was an infant, stunned by his very existence, wondering where on earth he had come from.

It's a great time to be alive.