Oh, my passion! That is what finally carried me through. Let passion burn all the way, heating up every layer of the psyche.

Friends open the door for me to write. Then I get paid attention to and it allows me to write other books. The Great Spring and the thirtieth anniversary of Bones just came out and while I'm happy and excited about that, I've already finished a new book. That's what practice does. You don't get caught.

First thoughts have tremendous energy. The internal censor usually squelches them, so we live in the realm of second and third thoughts, thoughts on thought, twice and three times removed from the direct connection of the first fresh flash.

We are important and our lives are important, magnificent really, and their details are worthy to be recorded.

We are searching for the core of our lives; our culture intuits that writing, that ancient activity, might be the pathway...Awakening does not feed ego's needs and desires; it pulverizes the self. Our society couldn't knowingly bear such reduction, so we've tricked ourselves into the same path but call it writing.

Choose your tools carefully, but not so carefully that you get uptight or spend more time at the stationery store than at your writing table.

To stay close and intimate with experience is to stay close to the mind; the nitty gritty mind of the way things really are.