When the word I want but don’t yet know isn’t coming it means I’m not seeing what I’m trying to write accurately.

The thing about sentences is that they are almost always connected to other sentences, growing out of and into what came before and what will come after. It is the rare sentence that can stand entirely alone, as satisfying as a poem.

It was exhausting trying to assess oneself through the lens of other people.

I remain a fan of and believer in humanity. Though I am thoroughly schooled in our resume of cruelty, violence, and greed, I feel only good from the people I meet.

Comparison often comes disguised as something practical like how another person promoted him or herself or built their platform. It’s a rouse.

The difference between what you believed once and what you know now is comedy.

If given a choice between a trip to Grand Central Station or a great conversation in my hotel lobby, I’ll take the conversation every time.

I don’t know how long it’s going to take me to quit thinking I need to predict the future.

What a strange and helpful little voice. No one else could hear it, nor could they see its source, yet it was often all that sustained me when all I could perceive was a wasteland of rejection.

Certainty is not the same as knowing the way. My page is just as blank and the path is just as obscured now as it was when I was a younger writer.

It is important as a writer to remember that out there in the reading wilderness are strangers looking for what you have written.

There is nothing like the freedom of discovering you are safe to say what you most want to say. How friendly the world becomes in that holy instant.

Here’s why I was glad I went to my first writer’s conference: I learned that professional writers, agents, and editors were real people.