When you are not writing, you are a writer too. It doesn't leave you.

And we can't avoid an inch of our own experience; if we do it causes a blur, a bleep, a puffy unreality. Our job is to wake up to everything, because if we slow down enough, we see that we are everything.

We are each a concert reverberating with our whole lives and reflecting and amplifying the world around us.

That daydreaming seemed important at the time, but when I asked my teacher Katagiri Roshi about it, he said, "Oh, it's just laziness. Get to work." But as for discipline, I don't even use that word. I think more about passion or love. What I've really learned is the way the mind moves, and how the mind works. Rather than discipline, I know how to seduce my mind.

The muscles of writing are not so visible, but they are just as powerful: determination, attention, curiosity, a passionate heart.

While I had cancer, I wrote these twenty-two personal essays about how I lived my life backed by Zen and writing.

I feel very rich when I have time to write and very poor when I get a regular paycheck and no time at my real work.