It's all right to have secrets, ... as long as you don't have any secrets from yourself.

Why is life so complicated....?' I asked. 'To keep us from being bored,' he said.

I can never understand why people who have not seen me for a while ask if I am still writing. They might as well ask me if I am still breathing.

The first draft is just a skeleton-just bare bones. It's like the very first rehearsal of a play, where the director moves the actors around mechanically to get a feel of the action.

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

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.