I knew that the moment I started worrying about whether or not I was good enough for the job, I wouldn't be able to do it.

We human beings grow through our failures, not our virtues.

Remember the root word of humble and human is the same: humus: earth. We are dust. We are created; it is God who made us and not we ourselves. But we were made to be co-creators with our maker.

In the final exam in the Chaucer course we were asked why he used certain verbal devices, certain adjectives, why he had certain characters behave in certain ways. And I wrote, 'I don't think Chaucer had any idea why he did any of these things. That isn't the way people write.' I believe this as strongly now as I did then. Most of what is best in writing isn't done deliberately.

For the past several generations we've forgotten what the psychologists call our archaic understanding, a willingness to know things in their deepest, most mythic sense. We're all born with archaic understanding, and I'd guess that the loss of it goes directly along with the loss of ourselves as creators.

Because it is the nature of love to create, a marriage itself is something which has to be created, so that, together we become a new creature.

It's not my brain that's writing the book, it's these hands of mine.