I am practical by nature, and I'd heard that being a writer or an artist is a good way to starve! So I was an economics major at Oklahoma State, and then received an M.S. from Cornell in Agricultural Resource and Managerial Economics. I knew if I wan...
In the early '90s, I was disillusioned after the blasts and riots in Mumbai. I was in college and started thinking that religion was the root cause of all these evils. While my father told me not to blame religion because of a few bad people, I wasn'...
Religion is part of the human make-up. It's also part of our cultural and intellectual history. Religion was our first attempt at literature, the texts, our first attempt at cosmology, making sense of where we are in the universe, our first attempt a...
I do have faith. I don't have faith that a God exists, nor do I have faith that one does not; I have absolute faith that I do not know, cannot know, am only human, am an infinitesimal creature packed onto a cramped planet crowded with seven billion b...
There are a lot of things I can take, and a few that I can't. What I can't take is when my older brother, who's everything that I want to be, starts losing faith in things. I saw that look in your eyes last night. I don't ever want to see that look i...
If I was freer than I had ever been in my life, I was not yet entirely free, for I still hung on to an idea that had been set deep in me by all my schooling so far: I was a bright boy and I ought to make something out of myself... something else that...
I don't like to waste notes, not even one. I like to put the right note in the right place, and my influences have always been those kinds of players. Keith Richards comes to mind, and I really like Nils Lofgren's soloing, because he's so melodic. I ...
Travel does what good novelists also do to the life of everyday, placing it like a picture in a frame or a gem in its setting, so that the intrinsic qualities are made more clear. Travel does this with the very stuff that everyday life is made of, gi...
Thank You for letting me live for a little as one of the sane; thank You for letting me know what this is like. Thank You for letting me look at your frightening blue sky without fear, and your terrible world without terror, and your loveless psychot...
I'm growing fonder of my staff; I'm growing dimmer in my eyes; I'm growing fainter in my laugh; I'm growing deeper in my sighs; I'm growing careless of my dress; I'm growing frugal of my gold; I'm growing wise; I'm growing--yes,-- I'm growing old.
Books are an amazing thing. Anyone who thinks of them as an escape from reality or as something you should get your nose out of and go outside and play, or as merely a distraction or an amusement or a waste of time is - dead wrong. Books are the most...
When I was growing up, I always read horror books, while my sister read romance novels. My sister became unmarried and pregnant during high school, and she kept saying, 'This wasn't supposed to happen! Why is this happening to me?' Someone should hav...
My son, Wolf, was born when I was past 40 and the author of a best-selling novel. That means he has grown up a middle-class child - one who sometimes asks me for stories of my childhood but knows nothing of what it means to grow up poor and afraid. I...
In the process, what must be spoken meets what cannot be said. Each word is a catalyst, requiring the writer to break out forcefully from another story, from the primitive camp where history, society, and politics converge, to touch upon that 'what' ...
When he was dry, he believed it was alcohol he needed, but when he had a few drinks in him, he knew it was something else, possibly a woman; and when he had it all -- cash, booze, and a wife -- he couldn't be distracted from the great emptiness that ...
I thought I was growing wings— it was a cocoon. I thought, now is the time to step into the fire— it was deep water. Eschatology is a word I learned as a child: the study of Last Things; facing my mirror—no longer young, the news—always of de...
Writing the poems, I came to think that regarding is a form of love, but the regarding is not necessarily accurate. In the poems, people are always misperceiving one another. But misperceptions are a part of being alive to others. You don’t need tr...
Even though I am the daughter of a poet, and my stepmother is also a poet, growing up, I didn't think I could understand poetry; I didn't think that it had any relevance to my life, the feelings that I endured on a day-to-day basis, until I was intro...
When I heard that there were artists, I wished I could some time be one. If I could only make a rose bloom on paper, I thought I should be happy! Or if I could at last succeed in drawing the outline of winter-stripped boughs as I saw them against the...
Gardeners may create order briefly out of chaos, but nature always gets the last word, and what it says is usually untidy by human standards. But I find all states of nature beautiful, and because I want to delight in my garden, not rule it, I just a...
I hate first drafts, and it never gets easier. People always wonder what kind of superhero power they'd like to have. I wanted the ability for someone to just open up my brain and take out the entire first draft and lay it down in front of me so I ca...
