I sit there and think how it isn't fair that I can't drink at all, even a little. I realize I have crammed an entire lifetime of moderate drinking into a decade of hard-core drinking and that is why. I blew my wad.

You manufacture beauty with your mind

And I tend to listen to NPR when I'm not writing.

I suppose home is, for me, more of a state of mind. It's really more of about being where I want to be with people I care about.

You would be amazed by what you can give up, lose, or break, and yet still be a person who gets happy over brownies.

Optimism sprouts from the knowledge that you are in control of your own life, not your past and not those around you. Part of being in control is taking responsibility for how you feel. This means not just admitting to uncomfortable feelings but then examining your circumstances to see what can be done to change these feelings at the source.

I knew that if I wrote a new book every six months or every year, if I continued to read great books, eventually I would write something worthy of publication. I understood I might be in my forties or my fifties or even my sixties, but I felt confident that it would happen.