Do what you love. Live fearlessly and take risks. Don't take no for an answer from anyone - go ahead and prove the naysayers wrong. Believe that anything can be possible.

Open adoption, when it works, is fabulous. But when it goes wrong, it's so traumatizing for everybody.

Writers are magpies, and we collect details about people and we use them for fictional characters.

I had a nervous breakdown at 17 when my first love left me, and he was a typical bad boy, albeit a charismatic one, with a string of broken hearts trailing behind him.

I always think that in a big city, anything is possible, including reinventing yourself.

Everyone thinks that a new place or a new identity will jumpstart a new life.

I was a bookworm who aced every test - until third grade, when my teacher handed out a pop quiz about Jesus and the Apostles.

L.A. is a place people come to for all sorts of reasons, often to reinvent themselves, and that fascinates me.

My first husband was a serial cheater.

Never be with anyone you couldn't imagine yourself being able to live without.

People love stories. They need stories.

If anything in nature was as beautiful as it was deadly, it was she.

She walked beside Jared, four inches of rain-dashed darkness between her hanging wrist and his.

He (Jesus) became what we are that He might make us what He is.

If E.F. Harriman paid me what he's paying those guys to stop me from robbing him, I'd stop robbing him.

Leaders set the tone for their peers. Peers look up to them and say, 'They're doing it, so I'm doing it.'

Times change: it was once the custom to take a bath weekly and religion daily.

We must transfer our anger to the brutalities of our time.

You are very familiar with Western ways, but you are too young. You go everywhere to follow the big news, but the questions you ask are too simple -- sometimes naive.

I've always said Thomas Edison invented the movie camera to show people killing and kissing.

It's love,' they say. You touch the right one and a whole half of the universe wakes up, a new half.