Over and over, we have to go back to the beginning. We should not be ashamed of this. It is good. It's like drinking water.

It is very important to go home if you want your work to be whole. You don't have to move in with your parents again and collect a weekly allowance, but you must claim where you come from and look deep into it. Come to honor and embrace it, or at the least, accept it.

If you read good books, when you write, good books will come out of you.

The deepest secret in our heart of hearts is that we are writing because we love the world.

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

Can we walk that thin line between constant change and continuation? And in the middle of this flux, feel gratitude but not hold on? Gratitude greases the joints to let us let go, and at the same time to stop and realize we received something. Gratitude is the most developed and mature of human emotions.

I consider writing a legitimate Zen practice.