Becoming a woman is an act partly of nature and partly of self-invention.

I was really influenced by Joan Didion and Pauline Kael; they were both at the height of their influence when I was coming into my own as a reader.

I miss my mother very much, and I feel closest to her when I have dinner in the oven and the children are nearby playing and I'm reading a book or doing some little project.

It can be demonstrated from history that no society has ever survived after its family life deteriorated.

Female adolescence is - universally - an emotionally and psychologically intense period.

Divorce in a young-adult novel means what being orphaned meant in a fairy tale: vulnerability, danger, unwanted independence.

Girls are really looking to places that have limits and boundaries: where adults are the adults and there are rules, and where they feel safe.

Marriage remains the most efficient engine of disenchantment yet invented.

Keeping a diary is like closing your bedroom door and refusing to come out until dinnertime: it is a declaration of self.

Girls are the best readers in the world. Reading is really a way of kind of escaping so deeply into yourself and pursuing your own thoughts within the construct of a story.

If you're a writer, you just keep following the path - keep going deeper and deeper into the things that interest you.

Your consent is your character.

It's time for us to rise up, get out of the rut and routine, and begin to take our Christian faith seriously.

I foresee a great funeral contest over me.

Art is History's nostalgia, it prefers a thatched roof to a concrete factory, and the huge church above a bleached village.

I don't really go back over my old shows, but I'll see them occasionally, mostly I want to go back and change things about the character as I look at them.

There is no danger is letting people have their say. ... There is a danger when you try to stop them from saying it.

I'm always impressed with the way the writers find new and creative ways of killing people. But my favourite has to be the hat pin through the ear.

When you don't understand, it's sometimes easier to look like you do.

God cast you in His play, wrote you into His story. He has a definite direction for your life. Fulfill it and enjoy fulfillment. Play the part God prepared for you and get ready for some great days.

With all this darkness round me I feel less alone.