In Catholicism, we would say you're going to be judged, so therefore you should do better now. For me, Buddhism is somewhat more workable because instead of saying I have to do good, it says I have to notice what I'm actually doing.

I think kindness is a sort of gateway virtue - having that simple aspiration can get you into deep water very quickly - in a good way.

I see this quality [real interest and joy] in the work of [Pavel] Chekhov, of course, and [Alexei] Tolstoy and really just about any great writer.

As Flannery O'Connor says, a person can choose what she writes but she can't choose what she makes live. Some people are really acoustic writers and so for them the secret revision is sound. Other people may revise in terms of the way a paragraph feels. There's a million ways to do it.

Developing our sympathetic compassion is not only possible but the only reason for us to be here on earth.

So I may not have had a gothic childhood, but childhood makes its own gothicity.

With non-fiction writing I feel like I'm confined and driven by what actually happened. That makes the "plot". So it's a process of getting all of my notes typed up, then scanning through the notes, trying to extract or find certain vignettes that seem like they might write well - that might have a potential for good energy, shape, etc. And then at some point I start stringing these together, keeping an eye on the word count.