One way to tell if you're really comfortable with a person is if you can be quiet together sometimes and not feel awkward. If you don't feel obligated to say something brilliant or funny or surprising or cool. You can just be together. You can just be.

Happiness is wanting what you have.

Since no one really knows what or who God is, or whether God is at all, why can't God be hope?

We all have our own battles to fight, and sometimes we have to go it alone. I'm stronger than you think, you'd be surprised.

Anyone of any age, any race, any background, any education - if they write an interesting enough book - can become a published author. What it takes is imagination, the ability to put words on a paper in an interesting, perhaps even unique way, the fortitude to rewrite, rewrite, rewrite, and polish, edit, polish, edit until the story sort of sings. I think everyone has a story inside him, but only a few have the persistence and, of course, the interest, to write it down and see it through.

Once I have the idea for a story. I start collecting all kinds of helpful information and storing it in three-ring notebooks. For example, I may see a picture of a man in a magazine and say, 'That's exactly what the father in my book looks like!'...I save everything that will help--maps, articles, hand-jotted notes, bits of dialogue from conversations that I overhear.

There were so many of these moments that could never be captured accurately, even in the camcorder, only in the heart.