“Always act like a lady in front of closed doors. Never show emotion if it means risking your power.”

“This is the shade of meaning: the door of a physician should never be closed; the door of a priest should always be open.”

“A doctor’s door should never be closed, a priest's door should always be open.”

“The best books act like a powerful drug--they take you out of your own head into experiences, emotions and settings a million miles away.”

“I now realize what Dorothy means in the final scene from The Wizard of Oz, when she says that if you have to look beyond your front door for your heart's desire, perhapsit was never there to begin with. Maybe, like Dorothy, I should embrace the love right in front of me and not search for some elusive dream that never mattered in the first place.”

“If something inside of you is real, we will probably find it interesting, and it will probably be universal. So you must risk placing real emotion at the center of your work. Write straight into the emotional center of things. Write toward vulnerability. Risk being unliked. Tell the truth as you understand it. If you’re a writer you have a moral obligation to do this. And it is a revolutionary act—truth is always subversive.”