I am a terrible and lazy Christian. I do not believe that the Bible is the literal word of God. I just skip about a third of it.
I spend most of my time alone, because I so value and thrive in the quiet. Heaven.
I’m very successful, but there are 50,000 general interest books published every year. If you don’t want to read mine, there are others.
I have been somebody who has not written a great deal about the truth of my family’s life.
I think drugs are part of the magical possibilities of youth and I wouldn’t be here if I had continued with it.
My family tends to be pretty alcoholic and drug-addicted.
My experience as a writer is that you really do write seven and eight pages to find the paragraph you were after all along.
I’ve always understood that meditation had to be part of – or was part of the natural path and so I’ve always sort of dabbled in it.
If I have a huge audience, I’d like a bigger audience; maybe slightly a slightly more illustrious audience.
Reading poetry and reading the great works of the canon that we were reading in the ’60s and the ’70s and ’80s was mind altering.
My main problem is that over and over again, I try to get all my characters to say stuff that I think is so witty or erudite you know, so that everybody will go.
My father really taught me that you really develop the habit of writing and you sit down at the same time every day, you don’t wait for inspiration.
The difference between a writer who toughs it out and one who doesn’t is that you push through the parts where you know that you’ve just written seven pages when all you’re looking for is one paragraph.
In fact, there’s really only one thing that everything’s made of; it’s energy.
If you’re lucky you find your way into a spiritual community and you start to find the great teachers of all the ages who said the same thing. There’s only love, you’re made of love.
My father was a writer, so I grew up writing and reading and I was really encouraged by him.
It’s funny: I always imagined when I was a kid that adults had some kind of inner toolbox full of shiny tools: the saw of discernment, the hammer of wisdom, the sandpaper of patience. But then when I grew up I found that life handed you these rusty bent old tools – friendships, prayer, conscience, honesty – and said ‘do the best you can with these, they will have to do’. And mostly, against all odds, they do.
I have a lot of faith. But I am also afraid a lot, and have no real certainty about anything. I remembered something Father Tom had told me – that the opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty. Certainty is missing the point entirely. Faith includes noticing the mess, the emptiness and discomfort, and letting it be there until some light returns.
If something inside of you is real, we will probably find it interesting, and it will probably be universal. So you must risk placing real emotion at the center of your work. Write straight into the emotional center of things. Write toward vulnerability. Risk being unliked. Tell the truth as you understand it. If you’re a writer you have a moral obligation to do this. And it is a revolutionary act – truth is always subversive.
Help” is a prayer that is always answered. It doesn’t matter how you pray – with your head bowed in silence, or crying out in grief, or dancing. Churches are good for prayer, but so are garages and cars and mountains and showers and dance floors. Years ago I wrote an essay that began, “Some people think that God is in the details, but I have come to believe that God is in the bathroom.