Every life is different because you passed this way and touched history.

Mom is losing, no doubt, because our vegetables have come to lack two features of interest: nutrition and flavor. Storage and transport take predictable tolls on the volatile plant compounds that subtly add up to taste and food value. Breeding to increase shelf life also has tended to decrease palatability. Bizarre as it seems, we've accepted a tradeoff that amounts to: "Give me every vegetable in every season, even if it tastes like a cardboard picture of its former self."

Silence has many advantages…I write and draw in my notebook and I read anything I please.

I write every moment that is humanly possible. I write every day and every night. The only discipline I lack is the discipline is to quit.

Root out all the "to be" verbs in your prose and bludgeon them until dead. No "It was" or "they are" or "I am." Don't let it be, make it happen.

Write a nonfiction book, and be prepared for the legion of readers who are going to doubt your fact. But write a novel, and get ready for the world to assume every word is true.

What a writer can do, what a fiction writer or a poet or an essay writer can do is re-engage people with their own humanity.