For me, a good YA novel is the best kind of comfort food.

The truth is rarely as dreadful or as terrifying as what one imagines.

I was an outsider, never quite part of what was going on, always looking in. It turned out to be great preparation for writing fiction.

Write what you care about, what interests and intrigues you.

The book that made a lasting impression was the one my mother gave each of us when she decided we were ready for our first "adult novel," Lucy Maud Montgomery's The Blue Castle.

A man notices a womans figure when she walks in a room. Women have eight million words for blue; a man says dark blue or light blue.

Our house was awash in books, and my mother doled out her favorites like they were special treats - which they were.

Phoebe Wolkind Ephron cracked wise like Dorothy Parker and looked like Katharine Hepburn.

Outlining is like putting on training wheels. It gives me the courage to write, but we always go off the outline.

My rule of writing is that no one can do what you can do, so jealousy or competitiveness are pointless. I am always happy when one of my sisters has a book published that I get to read.

Life is the greatest of all mysteries, and though I seek to solve its many riddles, my deepest fear is that I will succeed.

I believe on you, rest of things doesn't matter. Take a deep breath, take your time. Time has gone, time will come.Time will be yours if you believe on yourself.

Many actions, like the Rhone, have two sources,--one pure, the other impure.

I guess I just don't like being physically in front of people I don't know very well, because I expect to be "seen through," or, even worse, instantly hated.

I have these wonderful homes, and no one to share them with.

I never knew as bad as it would be. I never knew it would be this vile, that it would be this bad, that it would be this vicious [with Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama].

I don't think I would be a writer if I had stayed in Chile. I would be trapped in the chores, in the family, in the person that people expected me to be.

I am no longer going to become a fictional character to please people. That's too much work.

You have to believe in what you're doing otherwise what's the point?

You know, we have two families: the one we're born into, and the one that we make for ourselves afterwards.