On the other hand, I still approach each book with the same basic plan in mind - to put some people under severe stress and see how they hold up.

Hurt leads to bitterness, bitterness to anger, travel too far that road and the way is lost.

This is for writers yet to be published who think the uphill climb will never end. Keep believing. This is also for published writers grown jaded by the process. Remember how lucky you are.

The muse whispers to you when she chooses, and you can't tell her to come back later, because you quickly learn in this business that she might not come back at all.

If you do not hear music in your words, you have put too much thought into your writing and not enough heart.

We live out our lives as we are meant to live them-with some choice, with some chance, but mostly as a result of the persons we are.

Growing up, I didn't have a lot of toys, and personal entertainment depended on individual ingenuity and imagination - think up a story and go live it for an afternoon.

We forget that what matters begins with the imagination.

Fear is a fire to temper courage and resolve. Use it so.

We must nurture and love, if life is to have any real meaning. But First we must find a way to survive against the things that prevent us from doing so.

Why pretend to be something you're not? If you have to be someone, be someone no one else is.

Beauty, it would seem, was both a blessing and a curse.

Jesus has not given us options to consider. He has given us commands to obey.

Can he love her? Can the soul really be satisfied with such polite affections? To love is to burn - to be on fire, like Juliet or Guinevere or Eloise.

In Google's world, public space is just something that stands between your house and the well-reviewed restaurant that you are dying to get to.

I only ever asked two people to work with me as a partner. One was Paul McCartney and the other Yoko Ono. Paul and me were the Beatles.

I sometimes think that the American story is the one about the reading of the will.

I knew each person's delusion, the places their records had scratched, where the sounds repeated.

It takes no courage to make war, particularly if you're not going to go and your children are not going to go.

You don't fight radical conservatism with not-quite-so radical conservatism.

A big shot is a little shot who keeps on shootin'