Don’t think too much. There’ll be time to think later. Analysis won’t help. You’re chiseling now. You’re passing your hands over the wood. Now the page is no longer blank. There’s something there. It isn’t...

I believe that we don’t choose our stories,” she began, leaning forward. “Our stories choose us.” She paused and took a sip of water. Her hand, I noticed was steady.. “And if we don’t tell...

Write the words “The FIve Senses” on an index card and tack it to a bulletin board above your desk. You should have a bulletin board above your desk, if at all possible. Some place...

Still writing?” I usually nod and smile, then quickly change the subject. But here is what I would like to put down my fork and say: Yes, yes, I am. I will write until the...

I’ve never heard a writer feel that way about a device with a screen. Oh sure, they’re functional, practical. We would be lost without them. But just as we need to feel our feet on...

The writer’s life requires courage, patience, empathy, openness. It requires the ability to be alone with oneself. Gentle with oneself. To be disciplined, and at the same time, take risks.

I try to remember that the job — as well as the plight, and the unexpected joy — of the artist is to embrace uncertainty, to be sharpened and honed by it.

Everything you need to know about life can be learned from a genuine and ongoing attempt to write

I believe that there is something connecting us … Something that was here before we got here and will still be here after we’re gone. I’ve begun to believe that all of our consciousnesses are...

I can tell you that the writing of a book, no matter how deeply, profoundly personal-if it is literature, if you have attended to the formidable task of illumination the human heart in conflict with...

If we are artists- hell, whether or not we’re artists- it is our job, our responsibility, perhaps even our sacred calling, to take whatever life has handed us and make something new, something that wouldn’t...

In the country, I stopped being a person who, in the words of Sylvia Boorstein, startles easily. I grew calmer, but beneath that calm was a deep well of loneliness I hadn’t known was there....

When I think of the wisest people I know, they share one defining trait: curiosity. They turn away from the minutiae of their lives-and focus on the world around them. They are motivated by the...

I had spent my childhood and the better part of my early adulthood trying to understand my mother. She had been an extraordinarily difficult person, spiteful and full of rage, with a temper that could...

Think of a ballet dancer at the barre. Plie, eleve, battement tendu. She is practicing, because she knows that there is no difference between practice and art. The practice is the art.

Rather than feeling vindicated, I felt guilty. It seemed cruel, and all my fault, somehow. My relationship with my mother had always brought into question any sense I had of myself as a good and...

To forget oneself-to lose oneself in the music, in the moment- that kind of absorption seems to be at the heart of every creative endeavor.

Gone was the reflexive need to see the worst in things. Before the tumors took her life, they gave her a few moments of grace.

This sadness wasn’t a huge part of me–I wasn’t remotely depressed–but still, it was like a stone I carried in my pocket. I always knew it was there. [p. 179]

I had no illusions that now, in some final and dramatic flash of revelation, we would understand one another. We were done. It was a fact of my life–intractable and sad–that our relationship had been...

Act as if you’re a writer. Sit down and begin. Act as if you might just create something beautiful, and by beautiful I mean something authentic and universal. Don’t wait for anybody to tell you...

In order to write a memoir, I’ve sat still inside the swirling vortex of my own complicated history like a piece of old driftwood, battered by the sea. I’ve waited—sometimes patiently, sometimes in despair—for the...