But it has been my experience that the risks are faroutweighed by the rewards, chief of which is when you speak to strangers as though they are friends, more often than not, if only for as long as the encounter lasts, they become friends, and if in the process they also think of you as a little peculiar, who cares?

The world says, The more you take, the more you have. Christ says, the more you give, the more you are.

I not only have my secrets, I am my secrets. And you are yours. Our secrets are human secrets, and our trusting each other enough to share them with each other has much to do with the secret of what it means to be human.

I'm trying to listen to my past, listen to what's most deeply going on inside myself, my creative set of fictional characters, a fictional world - to listen to that world, to search.

The preaching is part of the reason I don't go to church. Plus, I don't know, it was never part of my tradition.

Your vocation lies in the intersection of the world's deep need and your deep joy.

Justice is the grammar of things. Mercy is the poetry of things.