But I will say that living in Ireland has changed the cadence and fullness of speech, since the Irish love words and use as many of them in a sentence as possible

I wouldn't encourage new writers to start off publishing through electronic media... it still isn't wide enough for the readership they would need to get a good start

I have a shelf of comfort books, which I read when the world closes in on me or something untoward happens

Make no judgments where you have no compassion.

I think the Internet, particularly the availability of information, is great. I do a lot of correspondence on-line and have a chat line to talk to my fans as well

I did not have a chance to write novels until my youngest child started school fulltime

I think writers need windows on a view to remind them that a whole world is out there, not the minutiae with which they might be dealing on a close scale

How much can a dragon carry? As much as it thinks it can

What I used to do between writing fits was feed my kids, ride my horse and go shopping for cat and dog food.

Living is struggling to do something impossible; To succeed or die, knowing that you had tried.

The thing is, emotion - if it's visibly felt by the writer - will go through all the processes it takes to publish a story and still hit the reader right in the gut. But you have to really mean it.

Writing was a spiritual exercise for my father, the only thing he really believed in.

A tree does not stop growing because the wind blew off a few of its leaves.

God always has a reason for what you are asked to endure.

I consider it useless and tedious to represent what exists, because nothing that exists satisfies me. Nature is ugly, and I prefer the monsters of my fancy to what is positively trivial.

I've never had a car. Like I can drive, but I'm always at the risk of killing people.

I think that with some education there are real possibilities at the high school and college level, but more so at the college level, to bring people into cycling.

I like anything sweet.

We're not policy people and we don't want to be policy people. All we're interested in, as social scientists, is data that accurately represents reality.

Happiness is not in things; happiness is in you.

If you don't remember childhood and you idealize it, you can't write books for kids because they're not real. Kids pick that up.