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.

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

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.

He turned one of his death rays into an ice cream maker, except he said I shouldn’t eat too much of it at once.”I nodded slowly. “Right, ” I said. “That’s…sweet, I think.

The bond that links your true family is not one of blood, but of respect and joy in each other's life.

The death of the forest is the end of our life.

Literary readings aren't going to shake their reputation as the added-fibre of our entertainment diet until the people who organize and participate in them snap out of this mentality.

I would not choose to go where I would be afraid to die, nor could I bear to live without a good hope for hereafter.

For if joyful is the fountain that rises in the sun, its springs are in the wells of sorrow unfathomable at the foundations of the Earth.

We just cared more about connecting the world than anyone else. And we still do today.

The shell must be cracked apart if what is in it is to come out, for if you want the kernel you must break the shell.

Man is lyrical, woman epic, marriage dramatic.

Use your power gently.