“The more people I meet the happier I become.”

“You're on Earth. There's no cure for that.”

“No, I regret nothing, all I regret is having been born, dying is such a long tiresome business I always found.”

“The tears of the world are a constant quantity. For each one who begins to weep somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh.”

“Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

“To every man his little cross. Till he dies. And is forgotten.”

“I am in the world only for the purpose of composing.”

“Haiku is not a shriek, a howl, a sigh, or a yawn; rather, it is the deep breath of life.”

“Real haiku is the soul of poetry. Anything that is not actually present in one's heart is not haiku. The moon glows, flowers bloom, insects cry, water flows. There is no place we cannot find flower...”

“The first thing you have to learn when you go into the arts is to learn to cope with rejection. If you cant, youre dead”

“When I am grown up I shall carry a notebooka fat book with many pages, methodically lettered. I shall enter my phrases.”

“Love the work: the grind, the dreaming, the distracted not-sleep, all of it. Its the one thing in the job that will always be there, and the real pleasure in the profession. Everything else is luck.”

“Writing a novel is a bit like being Daniel Boone. An author stands atop a ridge in a mountain range and can generally see a number of peaks in the distance. What lies between those peaksthe dales a...”

“Dedicating a writing session to someone is like sending a prayer for them out into the world. I will never know if my writing, my dedication to them, my prayer for them made any difference in their...”

“I left my novels for better times, when I could dedicate the energy and enjoy the inspiration I feel while planning them; like the most delicious cherries on a cake one left for later so they can b...”