I'm happy if my book makes you want to kiss your family... if we can reconcile with each other no matter where we are on the globe.

Maybe if we can find time to hug and cherish our families and the people around us, child suicide or college suicide wouldn't be rampant.

I think fiction allows us to sit for a while with people we would rather not meet.

I'd say my religious life has shaped my worldview; my writing, I'd say too, is an extension of the pulpit...it reaches folks who don't care for organized religion in a different way.

After the phone call from The New Yorker, I walked more than a mile to church to thank God. But then I told God I would talk to Him another time and darted home.

I always felt my writing could benefit from the attention of established writers. I knew my work could grow and be better.

Then, as she turned in a majestic arc for home, a beautiful sunrise appeared on the horizon, as golden and perfect as the very first ray of sun at the beginning of time.

In childhood, we learn to remember everything and later, meditate to forget everything!!!!

Luck is not fate. Believe it or not, it's largely an attitude.

There seem to be a lot of black artists making very good videos that I'm surprised aren't being used on MTV.

If I'm insulted I will counterattack, or if something is unfair, I will counterattack, but I don't feel like I insult people. I don't want to do that. But if I'm attacked, I will counterattack.

No daintie flowre or herbe that growes on grownd, No arborett with painted blossoms drest And smelling sweete, but there it might be fownd To bud out faire, and throwe her sweete smels al arownd.

In real life, every field of science is incomplete, and most of them - whatever the record of accomplishment during the last 200 years - are still in their very earliest stages.

The inner man cannot be forced to do out of his own free will, what he should do, except the grace of God change the heart and make it willing.

I'm very happy because I won a lot. I've won races and lived in a world that just gave me joy, so I remember it very positively.

A woman with organizing skills can run a construction company without ever picking up a hammer and nail.