Welcome to New York, where everybody's a stranger, and nobody is.

If you have a dream of writing, that's wishful thinking. If you have a commitment to writing, that's the way to make your dreams come true.

New York City was the world's biggest vibrator. Everything vibrated above, and below the streets.

New York was an idea, I thought, an idea held simultaneously by thirteen million people.

Where there are problems, there are angels hovering about just waiting for us to ask them to help us transform our suffering into blessings. I'm not being religious, I'm telling you the truth as I have experienced it. ... And I'm not being trendy either. I was talking to angels long before they got fashionable. ... So maybe you don't believe in angels, that's all right, they don't care. They're not like Tinkerbell, you know, they don't depend on your faith to exist. A lot of people didn't believe the earth was round either, but that didn't make it any flatter.

You can have faith in writing itself. That's where to place your faith, in the same way that a pole vaulter places his faith in the laws of physics. He will go up in direct proportion to the strength with which he pushed off, and he will come down every time.

Welcome to New York, where everybody's a stranger, and nobody is.