I've got re-addicted to normal people, which is the loveliest thing to write about.

Thought is more than a right - it is the very breath of man. Whoever fetters thought attacks man himself. To speak, to write, to publish, are things, so far as the right is concerned, absolutely identical. They are the ever-enlarging circles of intelligence in action; they are the sonorous waves of thought.

I brought all the instincts of a writer with me into the monastery.

Basically when you're a writer and have a mind like mine, my mind has gone platinum multiple times, and I have got a heart of gold; my heart's in the right place.

I think everything we do, on one level or another, as writers, most of our writing is informed by our world view. It's informed by our own understanding of spirituality; things that matter, things that are important to us. I write about things that matter for me.

I stay out of politics because if I begin thinking too much about politics, I'll probably... drop writing children's books and become a political cartoonist again.

Never be entirely idle; but either be reading, or writing, or praying or meditating or endeavoring something for the public good.

its earliest form, a spontaneous and instinctive endeavor to shape the facts of the world to meet the needs of the imagination, the cravings of the heart.

Do we not continually pass by blessings innumerable without notice, and instead fix our eyes on what we feel to be our trials and our losses, and think and talk about these until our whole horizon is filled with them, and we almost begin to think we have no blessings at all?

Excellence is the accumulation of hundreds of minute decisions; it is execution at the most granular level. Once you accept the idea that you should give in to things that make no sense because other people do those things and you want to appear reasonable, you are on a path towards mediocrity.

I'm someone who has always had a positive outlook towards life.

If you think down, you will go down. If you think up, you will go up. You'll always travel in the direction of your thinking.