Close the door. Write with no one looking over your shoulder. Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It's the one and only thing you have to offer.

Every life is different because you passed this way and touched history... Listen being dead is not worse than being alive. It is different though. You could say the view is larger.

The changes we dread most may contain our salvation.

Many of us who aren't farmers or gardeners still have some element of farm nostalgia in our family past, real or imagined: a secret longing for some connection to a life where a rooster crows in the yard.

Morality is not a large, constructed *thing* you have or have not, but simply a capacity. Something you carry with you in your brain and in your hands.

A writer's occupational hazard: I think of eavesdropping as minding my business.

I know I have to write about the things that keep me awake at night.