Elisa Albert in a nutshell: funny, self-aware, and genuinely fearless that she might be a lunatic, or a genius, or both.

Nothing trains you better to write fiction than being really good at writing about your own interiority.

No one ever addresses the possibility that a writer might not like her book.

I would love it if my book was considered chick-lit or a beach read. That would be great. People would buy my book.

I think that people are generally really terrible at being ambassadors of their own work.

I don't think being a lawyer is more or less valuable than being a writer.

When you write in the third person, you get to imagine other people's interiority.

Women especially are trained to protect other people's feelings, and a lot of that involves not telling the truth even about the fundamental details of your own experiences and your own life.

Unless your aim is to deceive, there's not a meaningful distinction between memoir and fiction. They're marketing categories.

No human walking the earth thinks of himself as a bullshitter.

She wondered if it counted as being good if you did the good thing for purely selfish reasons. Probably not, but who cared. What was important was what you did, not how you felt.

That's not a religion, that's Pokemon.

Nowhere in the world, in no act of genocide, in no war, are so many people killed per minute, per hour and per day as those who are killed by hunger and poverty on our planet.

You never know that the things you're doing are that meaningful to society.

I am pleased to launch the Friends of Thailand Caucus in the U.S. House of Representatives.

God... Please keep my eyes focused on the only target worth hitting - Christlikeness!

Once he had taken hold, he did not let go. It was not a handshake, it was a possession.

Discomfort of any kind becomes the basis for practice. We breathe in knowing our pain is shared.

Many are the wonders of the world, and none so wonderful as man.

The writing is done on the computer, and the drawing is done by hand. I write, write, write, then I hit the illustration.

In China, you have to have a strong leader for a business to get anything done.