Quotes About Insight

Running, I shall argue, is a way of understanding what is important or valuable in life.

Listening is crucial for any novelist. Stories & ideas abound. We too often talk about ourselves & block out the richness others may offer.

A reader is a voyager, an armchair adventurer, travelling to different times, places, inhabiting different minds and worlds. What fun.

A reader finds a new reality on the page, interacts with an imaginary world, and is enriched by doing so.

A good novel takes the reader into the heart of another person. It lands you smack into the life and times of someone else.

A novel, though fiction, often speaks to the largest truths.

Writing is an act of revelation--to one's self and the world.

As a writer, you write about the world as you see it, and about yourself in disguise.

Writing brings the unanticipated act of self-discovery. Reading does, too, for one who's receptive.

Make art from your own life. Bring insight to your suffering, find distance, and in your maturity, write about it. Conflict & drama are the essence of a novel.

Fiction is a lie that tells deep truths

I sometimes surprise myself when one of my characters says something I would never say.

Writing is the gateway to learning about one's self. Reading is the gateway to learning about the world.

A writer's most potent tools are the inner mind and the shameless courage to explore it.

The world is exactly as it appears, if only you look hard enough.

A true knowledge of ourselves is knowledge of our power.

What if I have it all upside down? What if I'm the one who knows nothing of God, and the people in the world are actually interceding on my behalf with their ordinary daily struggles

A key prerequisite to thinking and writing funny is understanding funny. And

As Mark Twain observed, "Genuine humor is replete with wisdom.

Psychoanalysts learn a great deal about patients by listening to their humor. And you can learn a great deal about your own psychological makeup by constantly asking yourself (and answering truthfully), Why did I laugh at this joke and not at others?

The only thing your life teaches you is how to live your life. And that's only if you're very lucky. And you listen very hard.

I was a boy, and I believed deeply in the sightedness of horses. I believed that there was nothing that they did not witness. I believed that to have a horse between my legs, to extend my pulse and blood and energy to theirs, enhanced my vision. Made of me a seer. I believed them to be the dappled, sorrel, roan, bay, black pupils in the eyes of God.

by being both here and beyond I am becoming a horizon from "The Man in the Mirror

remembering what I had forgotten; of rediscovering what had been submerged under mental clutter.