1. “A life lived in chaos is an impossibility...”
2. "Because you’re not what I would have you be, I blind myself to who, in truth, you are."
3. “I do think that keeping an honest, unpublishable journal is helpful. Include what you are thinking, what you are
feeling, what you are responding to. Include what you are angry about that you heard on the news. don't talk
about the news in terms of politics, but in terms of your own life. What does this mean to you? So these are my
three recommendations: Read, keep an honest journal and write every day.”
4. “If it can be verified, we don't need faith . . . Faith is for that which lies on the other side of reason. Faith is what makes life bearable, with all its tragedies and ambiguities and sudden startling joys.”
5. ”I had the book pretty intricately plotted. This is essential, because if you do not have a plot there is nothing to change.”
6. “It's a strange thing, how you can love somebody, how you can be all eaten up inside with needing them--and they simiply don't need you. That's all there is to it, and neither of you can do anything about it. And they'll be the same way with someone else, and someone else will be the same way about you and it goes on and on - this desperate need - add only once in a rare million do the same two people need each other.”
7. “Readers usually grossly underestimate their own importance. If a reader cannot create a book along with the writer, the book will never come to life. Creative involvement: that's the difference between reading a book and watching TV. / In watching TV, we are passive--sponges; we do nothing. In reading, we must become creators, imagining the setting of the story, seeing the facial expressions, hearing the inflection of the voices. The author and the reader "know" each other; they meet on the bridge of words.”
8. "Stories make us more alive, more human, more courageous, more loving. Why does anybody tell a story? It does indeed have something to do with faith, faith that the universe has meaning, that our little human lives are not irrelevant, that what we choose or say or do matters, matters cosmically."
9. "That's the way things become clear. All of a sudden. And then you realize how obvious they've been all along."
10. “The world of science lives fairly comfortably with paradox. We know that light is a wave, and also that light is a particle. The discoveries made in the infinitely small world of particle physics indicate randomness and chance, and I do not find it any more difficult to live with the paradox of a universe of randomness and chance and a universe of pattern and purpose than I do with light as a wave and light as a particle. Living with contradiction is nothing new to the human being.”
11. “Truth is eternal, knowledge is changeable. It is disastrous to confuse them.”
12. “When we are writing, or painting, or composing, we are, during the time of creativity, freed from normal restrictions, and are opened to a wider world, where colors are brighter, sounds clearer, and people more wondrously complex than we normally realize.”
