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.

In the West, a teacher imparts knowledge to a student. In the East, a teacher transmits nothing more or less than his or her Being.

I don't think everyone wants to create the great American novel, but we all have a dream of telling our stories-of realizing what we think, feel, and see before we die. Writing is a path to meet ourselves and become intimate.

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.

If you are not afraid of the voices inside you, you will not fear the critics outside you.

The first thing is how awful cancer was, the experience. When you first go through it, you're just trying to survive. But when I wrote about it, I really digested it. It was unbearable but I had practice behind me.

Finally, one just has to shut up, sit down, and write.