Give me a labyrinth to walk and I can usually free my mind.

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

I always tell my students, about the biggest baddest things in life you must try to write small and light, save the big writing for the unexpected tiny thing that always makes or breaks a story.

Traveling is my priority, because it drives the writing, so I teach around the travel, and sometimes the travel is the teaching.

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.

I'm not very interested in telling the facts. I have a lot of investment in telling the truth.

The Universe has a plan to make sure we don't ever stop learning, not only in our minds, but also in our hearts.