“I've always figured the only way I could finish a book and get a plot was just to keep making it longer and longer until something happens – you know, until it finds its own plot – because you can't outline and then fit the thing into it. I suppose it's a slow way of working.”

“I always tell young swimmers: 'Practice things until you can't get them wrong. Not until you get them right.”

“I once tried to write a novel about revenge. It's the only book I didn't finish. I couldn't get into the mind of the person who was plotting vengeance.”

“There's a lot of talk these days about giving children self-esteem. It's not something you can give; it's something they have to build. Coach Graham worked in a no-coddling zone. Self-esteem? He knew there was really only one way to teach kids how to develop it; You give them something they can't do, they work hard until they find they can do it, and you just keep repeating the process.”

“The best way is not to fight it, just go. Don't be trying all the time to fix things. What you run from only stays with you longer. When you fight something, you only make it stronger.”

“Things just happen in the right way, at the right time. At least when you let them, when you work with circumstances instead of saying, 'This isn't supposed to be happening this way,' and trying harder to make it happen some other way.”

“I'm not loving you, way I wanted to
I can't keep my cool, so I keep it true
I got something to lose, so I gotta move
I can't keep myself and still keep you too No more wasting time, you can't wait for life
We're just racing time, where's the finish line?”

“Character, I think, is the single most important thing in fiction. You might read a book once for its interesting plot—but not twice.”

“But you can't muscle through a five-hour run that way; you have to relax into it like easing your body into a hot bath, until it no longer resists the shock and begins to enjoy it.”

“I went into my own black-out period [1942-45] which lasted two or three years where the canvases would simply build up until they’d get like stone and it was always just a gray mess. The image wouldn’t emerge, but I worked pretty regularly. I was fighting to find I knew not what, but I could no longer stay with what I had.”