Amor animi arbitrio sumitu, non ponitur; we choose to love; we do not choose to cease loving.

As a person, I do ascribe to a lot of magical thinking myself.

In the end, fiction is the craft of telling truth through lies.

While writing, writers are living inside a character or characters, and when the book ekes into the world, writers are living inside the reader. That's more than connecting.

Who, in the midst of passion, is vigilant against illness? Who listens to the reports of recently decimated populations in Spain, India, Bora Bora, when new lips, tongues and poems fill the world?

If there's a black cat that crosses the street in my path, I will turn around and walk 20 minutes out of my way to not cross it.

Depressing thought: my friends were the girls I ate lunch with, all buddies from kindergarten who knew one another so well we weren't sure if we even liked one another anymore.

Sometimes you have to let time carry you past your troubles.

I'm a private person, a shy person. Sometimes, reading for eleven hours straight feels to me like the perfect way to spend a day.

I love Twitter. It's like having a closet full of clever friends that you can visit twice a day, then shove back into the darkness when you're tired of them.

A lot of my work comes from a place of despair or fear. I often write in order to gain some sort of control over aspects of my life or the world that seem too dark to look at directly.

If I am looking for inspiration, then I read the religious scriptures.

If there was one thing I had learned. . . it was that politics was a damn dirty business.

Ask God to give you a greater hunger for Himself and a deeper desire for His fellowship. Then be honest about whatever is keeping you from prayer, and ask God to help you deal with it.

You need to be surrounded by people whose voices echo your soul voice.

I cannot shut you out the way I shut the others out, so maybe I can destroy you. Must destroy you?

Why me, lord? Don't answer that!

Stylistically speaking, Barack Obama could hardly be further from Jimmy Carter if he really had been born in Kenya.

Just the minute the FBI begins making recommendations on what should be done with its information, it becomes a Gestapo.

Like your weight set-point, which keeps the scale hovering around the same number, your happiness set-point will remain the same unless you make a concerted effort to change it.

We danced with one body, one soul... For me, Margot is my family. She is all I have, only her.