“The substance of grief is not imaginary. It’s as real as rope or the absence of air, and like both those things, it can kill.”

You know things are bad when a woman without any legs and who recently lost two of her own kids feels sorry for you.

It’s a great freedom to give up on love, and get on with everything else.

Close the door. Write with no one looking over your shoulder. Don’t try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It’s the one and only thing you have to offer.

Don’t wait for the muse. She has a lousy work ethic. Writers just write.

Sleeping alone seemed unnatural to me, and pitiful, something done in hospitals or when you’re contagious.

It’s what you do that makes your soul.

The average food item on a U.S. grocery shelf has traveled farther than most families go on their annual vacations.

It’s a funny thing: people often ask how I discipline myself to write. I can’t begin to understand the question. For me, the discipline is turning off the computer and leaving my desk to do something else.

She is inhumanly alone. And then, all at once, she isn’t.

I prefer to remain anomalous.

To think is not always to see.

There are some who’d hardly lift a finger for kindness, but they would haul up a load of rock to dump on some soul they think’s been too lucky.

A good title holds magic, some cognitive dissonance, a little grit between the teeth, but above all it is the jumping-off place into wonder.

Write a nonfiction book, and be prepared for the legion of readers who are going to doubt your fact. But write a novel, and get ready for the world to assume every word is true.

This is how Americans think. You believe that if something terrible happens to someone, they must have deserved it.

The most important part of a story is the piece of it you don’t know.

Bottom trawling is a ghastly process that brings untold damage to sea beds that support ocean life.

These men both publicly and privately have done so much for me. Without Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick I would be living in a little motel just around the corner here, trying to make ends meet.

Covetousness is both the beginning and the end of the devil’s alphabet – the first vice in corrupt nature that moves, and the last which dies.

I was raised a Catholic on both sides of the family. I went to a Catholic grade school and thought everybody in the country was Catholic, because that’s all I ever was associated with.

You can have peace. Or you can have freedom. Don’t ever count on having both at once.

The worst of my actions or conditions seem not so ugly unto me as I find it both ugly and base not to dare to avouch for them.

I’m not sure what you need first – the players believing or others believing in them – but in the end, both have to think it.

Watch out for guys like Scott Piercy and Danny Willett. They both play really good on fast, fast greens.