Candy is my fuel. Ice cream, too.

Oh, that sound? I'm in the hot tub, reading a novel.

Many people, myself among them, feel better at the mere sight of a book.

Every first draft is perfect, because all a first draft has to do is exist.

I suspected that there were things he knew that I had been waiting all my life to learn.

In many ways, being honest about 'Huckleberry Finn' goes right to the heart of whether we can be honest about our heritage and our identity as Americans.

Even if my marriage is falling apart and my children are unhappy, there is still a part of me that says, 'God, this is fascinating!'

Take naps. Often new ideas come together when you are half asleep, but you have to train yourself to remember them.

But what truly horsey girls discover in the end is that boyfriends, husbands, children, and careers are the substitute-for horses

In every society, the artists will be the ones who set themselves up as contrary to whatever the society expects.

I'm a natural novelist. I'm interested in the person and the group, and how they mesh. And one of the ways I don't want them to mesh is for the person to be subsumed into the group.

The birth of a child is the bliss of joyous celebration of new human being.

There is no good arguing with the inevitable. The only argument available with an east wind is to put on your overcoat.

I like these cold, gray winter days. Days like these let you savor a bad mood.

Ive introduced eight bills to fight for support for our small businesses and ensure we get funding to rebuild public housing - among other things.

It is as hard and severe a thing to be a true politician as to be truly moral.

Well, I think that Catholicism's basic foundation of faith is personal conscience. I think it's between you and God, not you and the Church.

When you're not goal-striving, not looking forward, you're not really living.

When God is our strength, it is strength indeed; when our strength is our own, it is only weakness.

You can sit next to somebody on the underground, and you can look at them quite intensely, but you can never, ever know what they're wearing under their clothes.

Imagination comes in after we have experience.