You don’t return people’s smiles—it’s perfectly clear to you that people can smile and smile and still be villains.

I wish there was someone I could have written to after that, someone I could have written to explain how awful it was to have someone touch you, then look at you properly and change his mind.

Home is where your teapots are.

I collected pictures and I drew pictures and I looked at the pictures by myself. And because no one else ever saw them, the pictures were perfect and true. They were alive.

The first coffee of the morning is never, ever, ready quickly enough. You die before it’s ready and then your ghost pours the resurrection potion out of the moka pot.

I feel like an old lady; my hero is Miss Marple.

Because things grow. Wherever there is air and light and open space, things grow.

There were days when he touched the tip of her nose and it was enough, a miracle of plenty.

The language of [Catholic] mysticism - its repeated attempts to lay consciousness itself bare and speak all the intensely opposing yet interconnected parts of it that cannot be spoken.

I think, basically, what I'm good for is reading - a lot.

I dont have a style. I just try to write what the story demands.

Rest as if you’ll live forever

We are besieged by simple problems.... Checklists can provide protection

The gift of the Holy Ghost operates equally with men, women, and even little children. It is within this wondrous gift and power that the spiritual remedy to any problem can be found.

Let's play with the career, if we can't find anything else to do

You establish a technique on how to develop characters. Everyone does it their own way, and that's what makes it fun.

I don't know what's wrong with me, but like, the second I stop working, I have a panic attack, so it's good for me to be thinking of projects ahead of time and lining things up.

The glacier was God's great plough . . . set at work ages ago to grind, furrow, and knead over, as it were, the surface of the earth?

Get eight hours of sleep regularly. Keep your weight down, run a mile a day.

The romantic treatment of death asserts that people were made singular, made more interesting, by their illnesses.

How every fool can play upon the word!