“The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can’t find them, make them.”

“The more room you give yourself to express your true thoughts and feelings, the more room there is for your wisdom to emerge.”

“Develop your own compass, and trust it. Take risks, dare to fail, remember the first person through the wall always gets hurt.”

“We spend most of our time and energy in a kind of horizontal thinking. We move along the surface of things...[but] there are times when we stop. We sit still. We lose ourselves in a pile of leaves or its memory. We listen and breezes from a whole other world begin to whisper.”

“As a writer you ask yourself to dream while awake.”

“The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say.”

“At night I read and write, and things I have never understood become clear; I reap the harvest of the rest of the year's planting.”

“Don't forget—no one else sees the world the way you do, so no one else can tell the stories that you have to tell.”

“Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”

“No matter how long you've been at it, you always start from scratch.”

“[Writing is] being able to take something whole and fiercely alive that exists inside you in some unknowable combination of thought, feeling, physicality, and spirit, and to then store it like a genie in tense, tiny black symbols on a calm white page.”

“I have never had a dry spell in my life, mainly because I feed myself well, to the point of bursting. I wake early and hear my morning voices leaping around in my head like jumping beans. I get out of bed quickly, to trap them before they escape.”

“I would hurls words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of hunger for life that gnaws in us all, to keep alive in our hearts a sense of the inexpressibly human.”

“Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind, is written large in his works.”

“The true alchemists do not change lead into gold; they change the world into words.”

“Don't be trapped by dogma—which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of other's opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

“I see your life as already artful, just waiting and ready for you to make it art.”

“The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power.”

“At some point in life the world’s beauty becomes enough. You don’t need to photograph, paint or even remember it. It is enough.”

“The theme you choose may change or simply elude you, but being your own story means you can always choose the tone. It also means that you can invent the language to say who are you and what you mean.”