Music inspires me and puts me in the right mood, but to actually listen to it when I write - I find it gets in the way.

With tremendous clarity and wisdom, Daniel Tomasulo has crafted a memoir at once heartbreaking and uplifting. Layers of time and memory—childhood, adolescence, early adulthood, middle age—are so beautifully revealed here, a trenchant reminder that our pasts are alive inside of us. There are psychologists who can write, and writers who can psychologize, but rarely have the two met on the page with such moving, profound results.

We can't protect ourselves from pain and heartache. In fact, to love - fully, madly, deeply - is the ensure heartache some day.

I do whatever is necessary in order to maintain the equanimity we all need to withstand the disappointment and rejection that are the lot of every writer, no matter where we are in our careers.

I remember getting my first cell phone in New York, getting into a taxi and thinking "This is the end of solitude in the back of a taxi." What used to happen in the back of a taxi? You looked out the window. My brain has become less able to spend lengths of time without shifting, and I worry about that.

You can start your day over anytime.

The Internet and all its lures are much, much harder than anything I've ever encountered. If you're writing on a computer, the very instrument you're writing on is already tainted by the world out there in all its permutations.