There weren't too many books featuring other cultures and countries when I was growing up as an immigrant kid here in the States.

American and Vietnamese characters alike leap to life through the voice and eyes of a tenyearold girl-a protagonist so strong, loving, and vivid I longed to hand her a wedge of freshly cut papaya.

I learned to read when I was three, so I skipped right over picture books and didn't learn to appreciate art in books until much later.

Good humor pokes fun at the powerful — not the weak.

We adults all stay sixteen or so in some corner of the soul.

Research is always a high priority in my fiction. Songs, fashion, politics, television, movies, trends - I try to get those details right.

I hope and pray that despite an unhealed past full of atrocities and deep divisions in the present, God can and will make "the distant near" and a "brother of the stranger" in America's future.

If you have a chance to see Children Of War, you can watch expert trauma counselors try to help bring healing to young people who have experienced atrocities in conflict.

You're under arrest for multiple counts of murder. You have the right to not much at all, really. Do you have anything to say in your defense?

i am a woman and a poem. – visceral

I’m only human, she told herself. There’s not enough room in my heart for everyone.

I have a right to my anger, and I don't want anybody telling me I shouldn't be, that it's not nice to be, and that something's wrong with me because I get angry.

We all have that desire for something special, something committed. We all want to be The One.

Being an artist, its all a journey, and you learn where the subtle patterns lie.

This flick is all I have to say about being 17, the United States Navy, Christmas and the Fourth of July.

To tell a woman not to talk too much was like telling Jesse James not to carry a gun, or a hen not to cackle.

I would like to die as I have lived disappear among the tundra winds be transformed into birdsong

I don't worry too much about the fundamentalist principles that are in almost any discussion about Jazz.