I think there is a place where self-awareness becomes self-preoccupation if you don't take what you have discovered and bring it to bear on the conditions of the world.

I don't feel there is any spiritual or metaphysical justification for turning our backs on human suffering.

You've done the bourgeois thing, perhaps, but let's not call that love.

You can live in your total potential creative capacity in an instant-with your heart open to give and receive love.

Some professional writers write everyday no matter what and perhaps that's the way it should be done, but it's not the way I do it. If I'm not pregnant with words and I'm not in labor with them, I don't even try to bring them forth because they won't be any good anyway. Once I'm ready to deliver, it's like being pregnant. I've got to find a typewriter or a piece of paper. The only words that have ever had any possible value to others seem to have been those words that just had to come out.

I surrender it to God, knowing that the pain itself is a product or a reflection of how I am interpreting whatever it is that is causing me pain. Some pain is simply the normal grief of human existence. That is pain that I try to make room for. I honor my grief. I try to be kinder to myself. I give myself time to move through and to process whatever is making me sad.

A long-term romance is like a rose bush. In any given season, a blossom might fall off. But if the plant is well nourished, then the season will come around again, and new blossoms appear.