In business, success often depends upon the relative age of your ideas.

Every human being is under construction from conception to death.

When I look at where I've been, I see that what I am becoming is a whole lot further down the road from where I was.

Destruction is a form of creation.

Yesterday I went home with him and we did the usual things. I haven't the nerve to put them down, but I'd like to, because now when I'm writing it's already tomorrow and I'm afraid of getting to the end of yesterday. As long as I go on writing, yesterday is today and we are still together

All good novelists have bad memories.

In the moment of shock there is little pain; pain began about three a.m., when I began to plan the life I had still somehow to live and to remember memories in order somehow to eliminate them. Happy memories are the worst, and I tried to remember the unhappy. I was practiced. I had lived all this before. I knew I could do what was necessary, but I was so much older—I felt I had little energy left to reconstruct.

It felt odd and poetic and encouraging coming back after so many years, a shape imposing itself on life again after chaos.

Like the prodigal's father, God accepts us as we are. But He doesn't want to leave us that way. God will change us.

We don't want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker's dam is the history we make today.

We are Jesus Christ's; we belong to him. But even more, we are increasingly him. He moves in and commandeers our hands and feet, requisitions our minds and tongues. We sense his rearranging: debris into the divine, pig's ear into silk purse. He repurposes bad decisions and squalid choices. Little by little, a new image emerges.

I am an American citizen and it is my home now. I like the U.S.A., which is not a place too many people have liked since Bush. The U.S. has a young population, and everything can change within a year.