Being on a book tour is like being on the seesaw when you’re a little kid. The excitement is in having someone to play with, and in rising up in the air, but then you’re...

I was raised in a family where none of us ever raised a voice, so there was no room to express feelings of rage or even unabashed joy – a little bashed joy, here or...

I was terrified of death by the time I was three or four, actively if not lucidly. I had frequent nightmares about snakes and scary neighbors. By the age of four or five, I was...

Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul. When writers make us shake our heads with the exactness of their prose...

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.

Here are the two best prayers I know: ‘Help me, help me, help me’ and ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you.

It is unearned love–the love that goes before, that greets us on the way. It’s the help you receive when you have no bright ideas left, when you are empty and desperate and have discovered...

The worst part about celebrating another birthday is the shock that you’re only as well as you are.

I’m much calmer as I get older, but I’m still just as capable of getting that strung-out stressed-out feeling of mental and spiritual unwellness.

I happen to be a Christian, but I know that there is one God. People worshipping goodness and love and kindness and truth are worshipping the same God.

I went to church with my grandparents sometimes and I loved it.

You can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.

The very first thing I tell my new students on the first day of a workshop is that good writing is about telling the truth. We are a species that needs and wants to understand...

I’ve given guys blow jobs just because I’ve run out of things to talk about.’Oh, Rae. Who hasn’t

I honestly think in order to be a writer, you have to learn to be reverent. If not, why are you writing? Why are you here? Let’s think of reverence as awe, as presence in...

You have to make mistakes to find out who you aren’t. You take the action, and the insight follows: You don’t think your way into becoming yourself.

Some people won’t go the extra mile, and then on their birthday, when no one makes a fuss, they feel neglected and bitter.

If our lives are made up of a string of a thousand moments, at some of those moments we look a lot more spiritually evolved than at others.

If the present is really all we have, then the present lasts forever.

I prayed for my heart to soften, to forgive her, and love her for what she did give me–life, great values, a lot of tennis lessons, and the best she could do. Unfortunately, the best...

Your problem is how you are going to spend this one and precious life you have been issued. Whether you’re going to spend it trying to look good and creating the illusion that you have...

It turned out this man worked for the Dalai Lama. And she said gently-that they believe when a lot of things start going wrong all at once, it is to protect something big and lovely...

And I felt like my heart had been so thoroughly and irreparably broken that there could be no real joy again, that at best there might eventually be a little contentment. Everyone wanted me to...

He is a writer. He makes the rest of them nervous.

My idea of absolute happiness is to be in bed on a rainy day, with my blankie, my cat, and my dog.

Everyone is flailing through this life without an owner’s manual, with whatever modicum of grace and good humor we can manage.

No one tells you that your life is effectively over when you have a child: that you’re never going to draw another complacent breath again… or that whatever level of hypochondria and rage you’d learned...

I’d like to learn to meditate with more enthusiasm. I can sit down and get quiet for 20 minutes, but it just has not been a part of my Christianity at all.

Man is born broken. He lives by mending. The grace of God is glue

You are lucky to be one of those people who wishes to build sand castles with words, who is willing to create a place where your imagination can wander. We build this place with the...

For some of us, books are as important as almost anything else on earth. What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world,...

Why couldn’t Jesus command us to obsess over everything, to try to control and manipulate people, to try not to breathe at all, or to pay attention, stomp away to brood when people annoy us,...

God can’t clean the house of you when you’re still in it.

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

We must not inflict life on children who will be resented; we must not inflict unwanted children on society.

I love readings and my readers, but the din of voices of the audience gives me stage fright, and the din of voices inside whisper that I am a fraud, and that the jig is...

The American way is to not need help, but to help.

Laughter is carbonated holiness.

Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.

Some people have a thick skin and you don’t. Your heart is really open and that is going to cause pain, but that is an appropriate response to this world.

I’ll live as well, as deeply, as madly as I can–until I die.

Oh my God, what if you wake up some day, and you’re 65, or 75, and you never got your memoir or novel written, or you didn’t go swimming in those warm pools and oceans...

The opposite of faith is not doubt: It is certainty. It is madness. You can tell you have created God in your own image when it turns out that he or she hates all the...

My mother was a not-too-devoted atheist. She went to Episcopal church on Christmas Eve every year, and that was mostly it.

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

When I was a child, I thought grown-ups and teachers knew the truth, because they told me they did. It took years for me to discover that the first step in finding out the truth...

I think joy and sweetness and affection are a spiritual path. We’re here to know God, to love and serve God, and to be blown away by the beauty and miracle of nature. You just...

We stitch together quilts of meaning to keep us warm and safe, with whatever patches of beauty and utility we have on hand.

[S]he believed that the Buddhists were right–that if you want, you will suffer; if you love, you will grieve. (68)

A writer paradoxically seeks the truth and tells lies every step of the way. It’s a lie if you make something up. But you make it up in the name of the truth, and then...