If you want to be a writer, you write. Everybody wants to get published. You gotta play your long game.

He smelled cold water and cold intrepid green. Those early flowers smelled like cold water. Their fragrance was not the still perfume of high summer; it was the smell of cold, raw green.

Who was the greatest business man ever. . . The greatest salesman? Advertiser? Who? . . . It was Jesus. . . Jesus was the founder of modern business. . . he picked up twelve men from the bottom ranks of business and forged them into an organization that conquered the world!

I was ravenous for my child and took to gorging myself in the boneyard, hoping that she might possibly meet me halfway, or just beyond, one night, if only for an instant—step back into her own bare feet, onto the wet grass or fallen leaves or snowy ground of the living Enon, so that we could share just one last human word.

If you want to be a writer, you write. Everybody wants to get published. You gotta play your long game.

Don't confine truth to fact. Imaginative truth is as powerful, and often enough, more so than fact.

I breathed the book before I saw it; tasted the book before I read it.