Once you have learned to trust your own voice and allowed that creative force inside you to come out, you can direct it to write short stories, novels, and poetry, do revisions, and so on. You have the basic tool to fulfill your writing dreams. But beware. This type of writing will uncover other dreams you have, too-going to Tibet, being the first woman president of the United States, building a solar studio in New Mexico-and they will be in black and white. It will be harder to avoid them.

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

Don't let yourself be thrown away....Continue on no matter what....Continue to make a positive effort for the good.

As writers we need to crack open language.

To encounter a fine book and have time to read it is a wonderful thing.

A responsibility of literature is to make people awake, present, alive. If the writer wanders, then the reader, too, will wander.

The difference between neurosis and wisdom is struggle.