I don't see myself as a deep philosopher. The things I write about tend to be what we all have to face, or consider, or experience, that I talk about with my friends and brothers. It's universal stuff, told in my own voice, my own details and truth, which is all I have to offer.
I believe that discipline and self-love are the total secrets to freedom.
My dad taught me that to be a writer is a decision and a habit. It's not anything lofty, and it doesn't have that much to do with inspiration. You have to develop the habit of being a certain way with yourself. You do it at the debt of honor.
I got one of the five golden tickets to be a writer, and I take that seriously. I don't love my own work at all, but I love my own self. I love that I've been given the chance to capture the stories that come through me.
I love silence. I seek and create it at every opportunity. I need it to work.
I find most famous Christians to be full of themselves and of prejudice and self-loathing, masquerading as devout religious belief. I find all fundamentalism to be terrifying and very destructive.
I can never tell what I'm doing when I'm in the middle of publication because I have no confidence. I have terrible self-esteem, along with boundless narcissism.
I spend most of my time alone, because I so value and thrive in the quiet. Heaven.
I am a terrible and lazy Christian. I do not believe that the Bible is the literal word of God. I just skip about a third of it.
I do not understand how deeply people seem to like my work - but I love that people feel I have helped them through hardships, and also have shared my experience of living a more spiritual and present life. It's so great to be able to make people laugh, because this is so often how we get our selves back.
I'm very successful, but there are 50,000 general interest books published every year. If you don't want to read mine, there are others.
My experience as a writer is that you really do write seven and eight pages to find the paragraph you were after all along.
I think drugs are part of the magical possibilities of youth and I wouldn't be here if I had continued with it.
If I have a huge audience, I'd like a bigger audience; maybe slightly a slightly more illustrious audience.
My family tends to be pretty alcoholic and drug-addicted.
I have been somebody who has not written a great deal about the truth of my family's life.
I've always understood that meditation had to be part of - or was part of the natural path and so I've always sort of dabbled in it.
Drugs took me to places; they were like portals. It's kind of a cliché, but they were like portals to altered states of consciousness into ways of imagining the world, or seeing a world beyond this world, or seeing a world beyond this world that I might not have gotten to unless I discovered meditation and a very deep, intense spiritual path based on contemplation and meditation.
My father really taught me that you really develop the habit of writing and you sit down at the same time every day, you don't wait for inspiration.
Reading poetry and reading the great works of the canon that we were reading in the '60s and the '70s and '80s was mind altering.
In fact, there's really only one thing that everything's made of; it's energy.
My father was a writer, so I grew up writing and reading and I was really encouraged by him.
