I write because writing is the gift God has given me to help people in the world.

If you are writing the clearest, truest words you can find and doing the best you can to understand and communicate, this will shine on paper like its own little lighthouse. Lighthouses dont go running all over an island looking for boats to save; they just stand there shining.

Everyone is flailing through this life without an owner's manual, with whatever modicum of grace and good humor we can manage.

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.

I've written six novels and four pieces of nonfiction, so I don't really have a genre these days.

What if we gave fifty percent of our discretionary budget to the world’s poor and then counted on the moral power of that action to protect us?

I realized I was going to get through this disappointing service, and anyway, you have to be somewhere: better here, where I have heard truth spoken so often, than, say, at the DMV, or home alone, orbiting my own mind. And it's good to be out where others can see you, so you can't be your ghastly spoiled self. It forces you to act slightly more elegantly, and this improves your thoughts, and thereby the world.