Surely it is an odd way to spend your life - sitting alone in a room with a pen in your hand, hour after hour, day after day, year after year, struggling to put words on pieces of paper in order to give birth to what does not exist, except in your head. Why on earth would anyone want to do such a thing? The only answer I have ever been able to come up with is: because you have to, because you have no choice.

Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece.

Writing is a concentrated form of thinking. I don't know what I think about certain subjects, even today, until I sit down and try to write about them. Maybe I wanted to find more rigorous ways of thinking. We're talking now about the earliest writing I did and about the power of language to counteract the wallow of late adolescence, to define things, define muddled experience in economical ways. Let's not forget that writing is convenient. It requires the simplest tools. A young writer sees that with words and sentences on a piece of paper that costs less than a penny he can place himself more clearly in the world. Words on a page, that's all it takes to help him separate himself from the forces around him, streets and people and pressures and feelings. He learns to think about these things, to ride his own sentences into new perceptions.

"My favourite piece of information is that Branwell Bront?, brother of Emily and Charlotte, died standing up leaning against a mantle piece, in order to prove it could be done.

My most important piece of advice to all you would-be writers: When you write, try to leave out all the parts readers skip.

Every morning I jump out of bed and step on a landmine. The landmine is me. After the explosion, I spend the rest of the day putting the pieces together.

A good story is always more dazzling than a broken piece of truth.

This tremendous world I have inside of me. How to free myself, and this world, without tearing myself to pieces. And rather tear myself to a thousand pieces than be buried with this world within me.

A blank piece of paper is God's way of telling us how hard it is to be God.

Being a writer is a very peculiar sort of a job: it's always you versus a blank sheet of paper (or a blank screen) and quite often the blank piece of paper wins.

At night, fishermen are paid for their hard work with one of the Pacific's greatest views-the gates to the heavens above. Hawaii's remoteness to the rest of the world leaves the skies unpolluted by man's industrial byproducts and artificial light known on the mainland. A man can actually look back in time when he gets far enough away from the shores of Hawaii and leaves modern society behind. He will find a sky above him before the hustle and bustle of mankind, a place where a stunning display of rhythmically twinkling stars are the norm and planets lay boldly pronounced. Shooting stars are commonplace and so is the humbling feeling a man gets when looking at this masterpiece before him. The boat churns up neon-green phosphoresce that glows in the water below like fireflies. When the ocean is calm enough and the moon dark enough, it is completely impossible to tell where the earth ends and where the heavens begin.

"Life is pretty short yet magnanimous if we know just how to live right. It isn't that easy, it takes a lot of our soul, sometimes too many broken pieces to finally come together in binding a masterpiece that smiles like a solitary star forever gazing around at the music of an eternal cosmos.

No one cared that my little world had come crashing down. I could cry if I wanted to, but I still needed to hold up the small piece of it that depended on me.

We experience, while still young, our most thoroughly felt desires as a kind of horizon, see life as divided into what lies on this side of that horizon and what lies on the other, as if we only had to reach that horizon and fall into it in order for everything to change, in order to once and for all transcend the world as we have known it, though in the end this transcendence never actually comes, of course, a fact one began to appreciate only as one got older, when one realized there was always more life on the other side of desire's completion, that there was always waking up, working, eating, and sleeping, the slow passing of time that never ends, when one realized that one can never truly touch the horizon because life always goes on, because each moment bleeds into the next and whatever one considered the horizon of one's life turns out always to be yet another piece of earth.

Words are like eggs dropped from great heights. You can't ever put the pieces back together after they hit home.

Find out who you are and become who you were always meant to be. Take all those scars and find the lines that trace them beautifully. Find wonder in your being and all that is you. Unravel those broken pieces that made you so unique.

It takes Intense Friction for a Nothing-Special Piece of Carbon to be the Diamond that Shines from Within.

Losing someone you love to death. Is like losing a piece of a puzzle. your world feel incomplete and there is no piece that can feel in for missing piece. There will always be that space of missing puzzle , even if the puzzle is complete.

What is made from the heart is a masterpiece.

Everyone is a puzzle, made of interlocking tiles you must piece together to form a picture of their souls. But to successfully build them, you must have an idea of their strengths as well as their weaknesses.

Perfection is only for the Gods. We have to keep going even if all we have left are pieces of what we thought we were.

"Here's something to consider: let's say that you spent hours upon hours upon hours drawing a work of art that would become your masterpiece. Consider all of the time and effort it would take to design and get every detail exactly right. Then think about how ecstatic you would be, the exhilaration you would feel, upon its completion.

Your thoughts become more pleasant in the dawn of transparency as they sink their coffins into the void of irrelevancy to bury their dead in the ground of your mentality as the optimistic tree branches to fertility to nurture the forest where spring and fall move rapidly to embrace the whole picture of happenings happily with the revelation that all the pieces fit perfectly in the design of the Master Who created destiny.

Yourself is a puzzle. All its pieces are one. You.