The question occurred to me: Well, if that's so, if the Divine is ultimately formless and genderless, what's the big deal? Why all this bother? The bother is because we have no other way of speaking about the Absolute. We need forms and images. Without them we have no way of relating to the Divine. Symbol and image create a universal spiritual language. It's the language the soul understands.

My ultimate authority is the divine voice in my own soul. Period.

Until we look from the bottom up we have nothing.

He'd gone to church for forty years and was only getting worse. It seemed like this should tell God something.

For me, creativity is essentially a spiritual experience, a conversation between my soul and me.

As an adolescent, I went to charm school, where I learned to pour tea and relate to boys, which, as I recall, meant giving them the pickle jar to unscrew, whether it was too hard for me or not.

Novels attempt to render human experience; that's really all they are. They are meant to convey empathy for the character.