The best thing we can bring to any fight is a calm and compassionate mind.

The other thing that's useful for me is this notion of the absolute versus the relative:if we walk out and it's a beautiful morning, it's only a beautiful morning because we don't have a broken leg or hemorrhoids or something.

We try, we fail, we posture, we aspire, we pontificate - and then we age, shrink, die, and vanish.

As a writer I'm essentially just trying to impersonate a first-time reader, who picks up the story and has to decide, at every point, whether to keep going.

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

Maybe you could even think 100,000 people are inside each human being. And you drop a novel on that person, and a certain number of those sub-people come alive or get reenergized for some finite time.

The Bush administration is a paragon of wisdom.