If you want to be happy for life, love what you do.

The truth is I hate cocktail parties when the only person I know is my supposed date, and he abandons me the minute we come in the door.

When someone is mean to me, I just make them a victim in my next book.

The flame of inspiration needs to be encouraged. Put a glass around that small candle and protect it from discouragement or ridicule.

Writing is storytelling. No matter how you slice it, you're saying, 'Once upon a time.' That's what writing is all about.

Happines is like mercury. Hard to hold, and when we drop it, it shatters into a million pieces. Maybe the bravest of all are those who have the courage to reach for it again.

live your life as if you may lose everything.

Approach your lives as if they were novels, with their own heroes, villains, red herrings, and triumphs.

The first four months of writing the book, my mental image is scratching with my hands through granite. My other image is pushing a train up the mountain, and it's icy, and I'm in bare feet.

A library is a path to the future--find yours there.

Funny, when you finally faced reality, it was amazing how clearly you could see things.

To resist the social pressure now put even on one's leisure time, requires a tougher upbringing and a more obstinate willfulness about going one's own way, than ever before.

Young people do not like to be always thwarted.

The recognition, the diagnosis, and the preservation of psychopathic individuals account for the apparent increase of neurotics in civilized communities.

Beauty is God's handwriting — a wayside sacrament; welcome it in every fair face, every fair sky, every fair flower, and thank for it Him.

Morality, too, is a question of time.

What interests me about genre is that the public connects immediately with it, it has certain rules, certain codes the audience recognizes. I can use that to create something very big.

Don't blame the marketing department. The buck stops with the chief executive.

We hold on so tightly that our hands are unavailable to reach out for the happiness we could gain by letting go.

If the world is ending, a woman will want to fix her hair. If the world's ending, a woman will take the time to tell a man something he's done wrong.

If I have a love-hate relationship with Martinsville, then we're missing the love part of the equation.