Life gives us what we need when we need it; receiving what it gives us is a whole other thing.

People are supposed to accumulate, I thought, as they get older, but I seem to be sloughing off, like a person wrapped in a hundred layers of cellophane, tearing one layer off at a time, trying to get down to me.

I've always said the toughest thing about learning to feel your feelings is that then you have to feel your feelings.

I write really well on the road.

When I was a little kid, I used to walk miles and miles and miles and miles and miles and miles of railroad tracks.

Movement helps keep me centered. I am a disaster, for instance, at sitting meditation, but I'm pretty decent at walking meditation.

There's this great Ron Carlson story, "A Note on the Type," and it's about this guy who keeps escaping from prison. He's really good at escaping, but he gets caught all the time, because he can't stop writing his name on underpasses where he's running from the law. And there's this whole beautiful paragraph about how to run is to write. And, you know, it's obviously about the writer's life.