Much of the time I’ve spent trying to impress people has been a waste. The reality is people are impressed with all kinds of things: intelligence, power, money, charm, talent, and so on. But the ones we tend to stay in love with are, in the long run, the ones who do a decent job loving us back.

When you stop expecting people to be perfect, you can like them for who they are.

I took William Zinsser's advice that you write to yourself and you hope that there are people out there who are like you.

Great writers know what to cut out. It's the same in life. Clear ambitions. Clear relationships. This is the stuff of good story.

I could not have known then that everybody, every person, has to leave, has to change like seasons; they have to or they die. The seasons remind me that I must keep changing.

I posted the first three chapters and I had enough people say that chapter two was dragging that I cut it out just before the book went to press. And I'm glad I did. The book is a lot better without it.

It's funny how you can't ask difficult questions in a familiar place, how you have to stand back a few feet and see things in a new way before you realize nothing that is happening to you is normal. The trouble with you and me is we are used to what is happening to us. We grew into our lives like a kernel beneath the earth, never able to process the enigma of our composition...Nothing is normal. It is all rather odd, isn't it, our eyes in our heads, our hands with five fingers, the capacity to understand beauty, to feel love, to feel pain.