The Chilean novelist Isabel Allende says there's no such thing as writer's block, you just need to live a bit more. I try to bear that in mind.

She liked the way his smile took a long time to arrive and just as long to leave.

I think it was Rose Macaulay who said, "A house unkept cannot be so distressing as a life unlived."

Two and a half thousand left-handed people are killed every year using things made for right-handed people.

Motherhood is all-encompassing, and in a way, as the mother, you're the star of the household.

As you'll know yourself, there are these moments when you're writing a book when one remark or moment will pull everything together and you'll think, "That's it. I've got what I need."

As other authors have realized, heat can have a strange effect on us, can cause odd chemical reactions in the brain. Heat can bring out secrets; it can change people's personalities.

Why isn't life better designed so it warns you when terrible things are about to happen?

She has spent most of the day reading and is feeling rather out of touch with reality, as if her own life has become insubstantial in the face of the fiction she's been absorbed in.

I have two sisters, and I think siblings are always going to be irresistible for novelists. They have been throughout time and they'll continue to be.

It is a terrible thing to want something you cannot have. It takes you over. I couldn't think straight because of it. There was no one else, I realized, whom I could possibly tell.

It was right that she was now staying at the ranch. She belonged there.

Circumstances don't always align themselves with human intention.

Humans are unbelievably data efficient. You don't have to drive 1 million miles to drive a car, but the way we teach a self-driving car is have it drive a million miles.

The more 'otter it is, the more 'otter otters likes it

Playing a flute is like writing a book. You're telling what's in your heart...It's easier to play if it's right from your heart. You get the tone, and the fingers will follow.

The mistake we make is to look for a source of comfort in ourselves: self-contemplation, instead of gazing upon God. In other words, we look for comfort precisely where comfort never can be.

It's amazing how words can do that, just shred your insides apart. Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me - such bullshit.

The power to learn is present in everyone's soul, and the instrument with which each learns is like an eye that cannot be turned around from darkness to light without turning the whole body.

When things go right, I read. When things go wrong, I read more.

Recovery is a bit like an addiction; you take it day by day. If you set yourself too many goalposts, you'll have problems.