Everybody is a hero in their own story if you just look.

I don't have ugly ducklings turning into swans in my stories. I have ugly ducklings turning into confident ducks.

I try to make my characters kind of ordinary, somebody that anybody could be. Because we've all had loves, perhaps love and loss, people can relate to my characters.

Nobody is ordinary if you know where to look.

I'm an escapist kind of writer.

Women who start out as ugly ducklings don't become beautiful swans. What they mainly become is confident ducks. They take charge of their lives.

The whole art of life is knowing the right time to say things.

Always write as if you are talking to someone. It works. Don't put on any fancy phrases or accents or things you wouldn't say in real life.

If you don't go to a dance you can never be rejected but you'll never get to dance either.

Because I saw my parents relaxing in armchairs and reading and liking it, I thought it was a peaceful grown-up thing to do, and I still think that.

We are all the heroes and heroines of our own lives. Our love stories are amazingly romantic; our losses and betrayals and disappointments are gigantic in our own minds.

When it comes to relationships, I find it best to have two feet out the door

It should not be possible for Christians to be disillusioned. We should have no illusions in the first place. Our faith is in Jesus Christ alone.

It is far more difficult to ask the right question than it is to find the correct answer.

I use a Blackberry. I'm so behind on mobile communication technology, I think a smartwatch may be too far a leap.

I'm very unphysical and graceless so basically if you save 10 people to be with you in a resistance movement, you would never save me. I'd be the last one.

I did not, thank the Lord, have to have a hysterectomy.

I don't think I've mastered anything. I'm still wrestling with the same frustrations, the same issues, the same problems as I always did. That's what life is like.

The true measure of life is not length, but honesty.

...the counsels of the Divine Mind had some glimpse of truth when they said that men are born in order to suffer the penalty for sins committed in a former life.

In the history of the hip hop world...there has been one, single, solitary human being in the history of the world. One female rapper to sell more albums than me in the first week.