These are the stories that we tell ourselves and only ourselves, and they are better left unshared.

To ask a novelist to talk about his novels is like asking somebody to cook about their dancing.

Secrets are like pregnancies hereabouts. You can hide them for a while but then they will start screaming.

Try pitching a story of happiness to your editors and their toes are going to curl up.

There is no remedy for death--or birth--except to hug the spaces in between. Live loud. Live wide. Live tall.

...crushed between the fears of going forward and the dread of going back.

My father had osteomyelitis-his left arm was withered between his elbow and his shoulder ... . But the amputation of a Stone Age man called Leaf, a stoneworker, does not relate to my father at all.