You have to put yourself out there as a writer, you can’t play it safe.

Believe in yourself and start achieving your dream. It waits for you on the other side of the publish button.

Honesty makes stories real and characters memorable. From there, taking them to where they need to go will be all the development they need.

Kids are flat-out freaking hilarious if you are paying attention. Not just my kid, but every kid.

Open your soul and put it out there and dare the world to read it, ready to have them stomp on you and laugh, but ready to do it again the next day.

The best part of being a writer is you get to tell people you’re a writer. That’s still considered cool.

Who do I think would appreciate my book?I’m surprised anybody does. Oops, did I say that out loud?

I wasn’t a class clown, because nuns have no sense of humor. They have rulers.

It’s amazing how my mind opens up right when I have to run on the treadmill. I’ve finished three chapters rather than run a mile.

I usually end have one outrageous minor character. He or she says the stuff I wish I had said in real life. Readers will love that character.

Writers need to be open to trying new things. My first bestseller was a cookbook, and from that experience I learned things about marketing a book that benefitted me greatly.

There's no trouble in this world so serious that it can't be cured with a hot bath, a glass of whiskey, and the Book of Common Prayer.

Truth lives, in fact, for the most part on a credit system. Our thoughts and beliefs pass, so long as nothing challenges them, just as bank-notes pass so long as nobody refuses them.

I think we must never, ever demonize one another. That's true not just black people to black people; that's human being to human being.

In consigning Elian back to slavery without a hearing, this administration is setting back the cause of freedom -- in this country and in Cuba.

I do have some kind of gravitational pull towards young characters with more responsibility than they should have.

Many a good poetic vein is buried under a trade, and never produces any thing for want of improvement.

There are a lot of books about the passing of the English aristocracy, but the vast majority of Long Islanders don't understand their own backyard. It's a private preserve.

Now I'm doing a film festival for kids and writing a script about a kidnapped journalist in Afghanistan.

I think I have a pattern of nice and lovely and then dark and twisted.

The more we deny that we have a dark side, the more power it has over us.