Waking up is seeing yourself just as you are, not as you would like to be nor as you are afraid you might be.
I knew the facts of death before I knew the facts of life. There never was a time when I didn't see the skull beneath the skin.
I don't think writers choose the genre, the genre chooses us. I wrote out of the wish to create order out of disorder, the liking of a pattern.
to look back on one's life is to experience the capriciousness of memory. . . . the past is not static. It can be relived only in memory, and memory is a device for forgetting as well as remembering. It, too, is not immutable. It rediscovers, reinvents, reorganizes. Like a passage of prose it can be revised and repunctuated. To that extent, every autobiography is a work of fiction and every work of fiction an autobiography.
It was one of those perfect English autumnal days which occur more frequently in memory than in life.
Write what you need to write, not what is currently popular or what you think will sell.
When I heard, Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, I thought, Did he fall or was he pushed?
Striving for happiness is a long, hard journey with many challenges. It requires eternal vigilance to win the victory. You cannot succeed with sporadic little flashes of effort. Constant and valiant living is necessary.
One cannot be honest even at the end of one's life, for no one is wholly alone. We are bound to those we love, or to those who love us, and to those who need us to be brave, or content, or even happy enough to allow them not to worry about us. So we must refrain from giving pain, as our last gift to our fellows.
It's a lot more common now for someone to know a Mormon rather than just know of Mormons out in Utah,. . . We seem more normal. We're not as exotic.
I love working with different musicians in the studio, that's a real joy working with someone for the first time.