Books have a life. They breathe. When you write a book, it grows and changes. You learn from your characters after you create them. They come from you and you become them.

Between the lines of every book the writer reveals their own secrets.

When you lose yourself in a book the hours grow wings and fly.

Writers strive for the impossible: perfection. Even the universe is flawed.

Characters begin as your children and become your teachers.

Write what you want to write. That's the only advice a writer will ever need.

Writing is like a religion to those who don't practise, an act of faith for those who do.

Who knows why we do it? And when we've done it, nobody wants it. Still we keep doing it. That's what makes a writer a writer.

Perfection is not something you strive for. Perfection is in the eyes of the beholder. Perfection is a state of grace, of peace of serenity, a moment as fleeting as a smile.

The only prophecy the artist can make with confidence is that he and his message will be misunderstood by a world that values all the wrong things.

I'm my characters' galley slave.

As an artist, motive means opportunity

He was a glass half full kind of person and she was...what? The glass is going to break before you can even pour kind of person. Yikes.

I should have realized, when Cathal kissed me in the hallway, that my response was the first raindrop heralding a storm.

If you're nice to me I'll never write anything bad about you.

There is no sin but ignorance.

The vision of milk and honey, it comes and goes. But the odor of cooking goes on forever.

Most of us are either too think to enjoy eating, or too fat to enjoy walking.

Beauty is not caused, it is; Chase it and it ceases, Chase it not and it abides.

Arnold Schwarzenegger made his tax returns public, [and] now there's a problem about him stretching the truth. Apparently under occupation he put down 'actor.'

In not only the physical science, but in the real mental silence, the wisdom dawns.