For me, writing historical fiction is all about finding a balance between reading, traveling, looking, imagining, and dreaming.

Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever.

Time is a slippery thing: lose hold of it once, and its string might sail out of your hands forever.

To say a person is a happy person or an unhappy person is ridiculous. We are a thousand different kinds of people every hour.

So how, children, does the brain, which lives without a spark of light, build for us a world full of light?

My preference is for prose with more silence in it, language that contains more pockets of strangeness.

Watching teething babies is like watching over a thermonuclear reactor-it is best done in shifts, by well-rested people.

It's embarrassingly plain how inadequate language is.

Anyone who has spent a few nights in a tent during a storm can tell you: The world doesn't care all that much if you live or die.

Leave home, leave the country, leave the familiar. Only then can routine experience--buying bread, eating vegetables, even saying hello--become new all over again.

A real diamond is never perfect.

In God there is no hunger that needs to be filled, only plenteousness that desires to give.

If chasing a pipe dream means securing our freedom, then so be it.

I may not be the prettiest butterfly in the garden to seek but, I am still there with my wings.

There are three answers to prayer: yes no and wait awhile. It must be recognized that no is an answer.

The thought of eternity consoles for the shortness of life.

The real artist while he paints does not think of the sale, only of the need to make a beautiful living thing.

I do not consider my self as having mastered the flute, but I get a real kick out of trying.

I've sort of closed my mind off to reality shows: I just don't watch them, don't care about them, don't know who the characters are, but they're all in general usage.

God bless our good and gracious King, Whose promise none relies on; Who never said a foolish thing, Nor ever did a wise one.

In the distant future, I don't want to be remembered; I want to remember!