Listen to your broccoli and it will tell you how to eat it.

You are desperate to communicate, to edify or entertain, to preserve moments of grace or joy or transcendence, to make real or imagined events come alive. But you cannot will this to happen. It is a matter of persistence and faith and hard work. So you might as well just go ahead and get started.

Try looking at your mind as a wayward puppy that you are trying to paper train. You don't drop-kick a puppy into the neighbor's yard every time it piddles on the floor. You just keep bringing it back to the newspaper.

Gratitude begins in our hearts and then dovetails into behavior. It almost always makes you willing to be of service, which is where the joy resides. It means that you are willing to stop being such a jerk. When you are aware of all that has been given to you, in your lifetime and the past few days, it is hard not to be humbled, and pleased to give back.

I've heard people say that God is the gift of desperation, and there's a lot to be said for having really reached a bottom where you've run out of any more good ideas or plans for everybody else's behavior; or how to save and fix and rescue; or just get out of a huge mess, possibly of your own creation.

When writers make us shake our heads with the exactness of their prose and their truths, and even make us laugh about ourselves or life, our buoyancy is restored. We are given a shot at dancing with, or at least clapping along with, the absurdity of life, instead of being squashed by it over and over again.

I was raised by my parents to believe that you had a moral obligation to try and help save the world.

Get to know your characters as well as you can let there be something at stake, and then let the chips fall where they may.

Writing takes a combination of sophistication and innocence; it takes conscience, our belief that something is beautiful because it is right.

Just don't pretend you know more about your characters than they do, because you don't. Stay open to them. It's teatime and all the dolls are at the table. Listen. It's that simple.

After a while the middle-aged person who lives in her head begins to talk to her soul, the kid.

Writing like this is a little like milking a cow: the milk is so rich and delicious, and the cow is so glad you did it.

There are a lot of us, some published, some not, who think the literary life is the loveliest one possible, this life of reading and writing and corresponding. We think this life is nearly ideal.

Some people seem to understand this -- that life and change take time -- but I am not one of those people.

There is nothing as sweet as a comeback, when you are down and out, about to lose, and out of time.

Help, Thanks, Wow.

I don't write about the intimate details of my cousins and aunts and uncles, and my mother and my father because it's not right to, for me.

You keep working on your piece over and over, trying to get the sections and paragraphs and sentences and the whole just right, but there's a point at which you can tell you've begun hurting the work with your perfectionism. Then you have to release the work to new eyes.

I like the desert for short periods of time, from inside a car, with the windows rolled up, and the doors locked. I prefer beach resorts with room service.

Trying to reason with an addict was like trying to blow out a lightbulb.