I love rewriting because that is where and how you discover the story. Its like you have this skeleton, and you get to put flesh on it and hair and clothes and really wonderful jewelry.

Open adoption, when it works, is fabulous. But when it goes wrong, it's so traumatizing for everybody.

Writers are magpies, and we collect details about people and we use them for fictional characters.

I had a nervous breakdown at 17 when my first love left me, and he was a typical bad boy, albeit a charismatic one, with a string of broken hearts trailing behind him.

Do what you love. Live fearlessly and take risks. Don't take no for an answer from anyone - go ahead and prove the naysayers wrong. Believe that anything can be possible.

I always think that in a big city, anything is possible, including reinventing yourself.

Everyone thinks that a new place or a new identity will jumpstart a new life.

I was a bookworm who aced every test - until third grade, when my teacher handed out a pop quiz about Jesus and the Apostles.

L.A. is a place people come to for all sorts of reasons, often to reinvent themselves, and that fascinates me.

My first husband was a serial cheater.

Never be with anyone you couldn't imagine yourself being able to live without.

School is testing our memory and real world is testing our memory + how we use this which we know.

This was the first time I noticed it, the inevitable space between father and man.

No one is polite to writers.

Life is too short to spend another moment imprisoned by the will of another.

If the worst thing a physicist could say about a statement is that it was “false, ” the best thing he could say is that it was “interesting.

When a man asks your advice, he usually tells you just how he expects you to decide.

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit. Aristotle How very little can be done under the spirit of fear.

What we do today is more important than what we plan to do in the future.

Don't just read the easy stuff. You may be entertained by it, but you will never grow from it.

That is one of the great secrets of life, that life is a movement. And if you are stuck somewhere you lose contact with life.