When we hope, we usually hope for the wrong thing.

A great deal of phenomenal experience has fostered in me a flexibility of the mind and imagination that some might call madness

The functions of intellect are insufficient without courage, love, friendship, compassion and empathy.

I believe that we carry within us a divinely inspired moral imperative to love ... We have within us the ability to change for the better and to find dignity as individuals rather than as drones in one mass movement or another. We have the ability to love, the need to be loved, and the willingness to put our own lives on the line to protect those we love, and it is in these aspects of ourselves that we can glimpse the face of God; and through the exercise of these qualities, we come to a Godlike state.

I never discuss a novel while I'm writing it, for fear that talking about it will diminish my desire to write it.

Sorrow is not a raven perched persistently above a chamber door. Sorrow is a thing with teeth, and while in time it retreats, it comes back at the whisper of it's name.

It is music that speaks to the deepest reaches of your soul, and you are lifted higher, ever higher, by the adagio, in my opinion more so even than in any of the masses that Beethoven composed.