“Pleasure, I remind myself, is inseparable from its lawfully wedded mate, pain.”

“Writing is a habit, an addiction, as powerful and overmastering an urge as putting a bottle to your lips or a spike in your arm. Call it the impulse to make something out of nothing, call it an obs...”

“I've always been a quitter. I quit the Boy Scouts, the glee club, the marching band. Gave up my paper route, turned my back on the church, stuffed the basketball team. I dropped out of college, sid...”

“But then, thats the beauty of writing storieseach one is an exploratory journey in search of a reason and a shape. And when you find that reason and that shape, theres no feeling like it.", 3:AM Ma...”

“First you have nothing, and then, astonishingly, after ripping out your brain and your heart and betraying your friends and ex-lovers and dreaming like a zombie over the page till you can't see or ...”

“In order to create you have to believe in your ability to do so and that often means excluding whole chunks of normal life, and, of course, pumping yourself up as much as possible as a way of keepi...”

“The only calibration that counts is how much heart people invest, how much they ignore their fears of being hurt or caught out or humiliated. And the only thing people regret is that they didn't li...”

“I wonder if fears ever really go away, or if they just lose their power over us.”

“Fear is all in the mind”

“Doesnt that feel safe: a whole world protected by $1 safety-switches.”

“How the hell do I know? It just hurts me to think about it....And its not because you're a great lay. Though you are. But I've had great lays before, and I didn't get torn up. You should have known...”

“Youth is no protection; in the end, life scars us all.”

“Strength? Safety, I said. And in that moment I realized that Id always equated the two in my head, but they werent the same thing. Sometimes people were strongest at their most vulnerable, dangerou...”

“When bridges seem to give way, we fall into Christ's safe arms, true bridge, and not into hopelessness. It is safe to trust! We can be too weak to go on because His strength is made perfect in utte...”

“Having low self-esteem and a shield of lard are not guarantees of safety. Having a warrior spirit, high self worth (most people are assaulted by someone they know, so if you think you're only worth...”