Sorry is the Kool-Aid of human emotions. It's what you say when you spill a cup of coffee or throw a gutter ball when you're bowling with the girls in the league. True sorrow is as rare as true love.

Love among the ruins... I'll tell you something, my friend: Weird love's better than no love at all.

Art is the concrete artifact of faith and expectation, the realization of a world that would otherwise be little more than a veil of pointless consciousness stretched over a gulf of mystery.

I had a period where I thought I might not be good enough to publish.

If you say, Well, OK, I don't believe in God. There's no evidence of God, then you're missing the stars in the sky and you're missing the sunrises and sunsets and you're missing the fact that bees pollinate all these crops and keep us alive and the way that everything seems to work together. Everything is sort of built in a way that to me suggests intelligent design.

It's as if God gave you something-all those stories- and said, "Here you are. Try not to lose it." But children lose everything unless somebody is there to help them, and if your parents are too stupid to do it, maybe i ought to.

Now panic beats and flutters inside my skull like a flock of starlings locked in an attic.