My parents were nonmaterialistic. They believed that money without knowledge was worthless, that education tempered with religion was the way to climb out of poverty in America, and over the years they were proven right.

Newt Gingrich wrote a novel, and he's a short story. Bill Clinton wrote a biography, and he's a novel.

Family is the last and greatest discovery. It is our last miracle.

Be kind to the living.

There has to be some mystery in life, because the joy of being a writer and the joy of being a musician is the joy of discovery. I don't want someone discovering for me what I should be discovering on my own. If a person is discovering for me, then they're living for me. It's my responsibility, indeed it's my privilege, to go out and discover the world for myself.

I grew up in the church, and so I feel that God gave me certain things to do, and I'm lucky enough to kind of have figured those things out. I just don't want to die not having tried to help somebody else with what I know.

I felt like a Tinker toy kid building my own self out of one of those toy building sets; for as she laid her life before me, I reassembled the tableau of her words like a picture puzzle, and as I did, so my own life was rebuilt.