All the travelin I ever done is going around the coffeepot looking for the handle.

You know, one of the tragedies of real life is that there is no background music.

You should write because you love the shape of stories and sentences and the creation of different words on a page. Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write.

I wish I knew how to quit you.

Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write.

Anyway, there's something wrong with everybody and it's up to you to know what you can handle.

If you get the landscape right, the characters will step out of it, and they'll be in the right place.

We're all strange inside. We learn how to disguise our differences as we grow up.

I think it's important to leave spaces in a story for readers to fill in from their own experience.

Develop craftsmanship through years of wide reading.

What we fear we often rage against.

Planning provides certainty.

Necessity is a mother.

...the greater objective (representative) perfection there is in our idea of a thing, the greater also must be the perfection of its cause.

I am grateful to the motherland and the people. I feel honored to fly into space on behalf of hundreds of millions of female Chinese citizens.

As a child, I was never drawn toward depraved or extreme situations; I really wanted a normal little childhood. Unfortunately, that's just not what happened.

A girl can wait for the right man to come along but in the meantime that still doesn't mean she can't have a wonderful time with all the wrong ones.

No matter what you do, no matter how hard it is, no matter how challenging it isdo it with a smile on your face.

I have to paint at least two times a week, and there's not enough time in the day to do everything.

Maybe that's what you got when you stood over your grief, facing it finally. A sense of its depths, its area, the distance across, and the way over or around it, whichever you chose in the end.

It would be disastrous if bad planning policy meant that today's new developments become tomorrow's climate slums