As for discipline—it's important, but sort of overrated. The more important virtue for a writer, I believe, is self-forgiveness. Because your writing will always disappoint you. Your laziness will always disappoint you.

To sit patiently with a yearning that has not yet been fulfilled, and to trust that, that fulfillment will come, is quite possibly one of the most powerful "magic skills" that human beings are capable of. It has been noted by almost every ancient wisdom tradition

We don't realize that, somewhere within us all, there does exist a supreme self who is eternally at peace.

You are accidentally leaving your DNA all over everything in a novel because it's all coming from you.

Nothing in the last few years has dazzled me more than Hilary Mantel's 'Wolf Hall,' which blew the top of my head straight off. I've read it three times, and I'm still trying to figure out how she put that magnificent thing together.

What Richard is talking about is instead admitting to the existence of negative thoughts, understanding where they came from and why they arrived, and then - with great forgiveness and fortitude - dismissing them.

I love my pizza so much, in fact, that I have come to believe in my delirium that my pizza might actually love me, in return. I am having a relationship with this pizza, almost an affair.