I always find something in common with my protagonist, particularly when I write in the first person.

You can only control your own actions. Not other people’s reactions.

A son is a son 'til he gets a wife, but a daughter is a daughter all her life.

Love and friendship. They are what make us who we are, and what can change us, if we let them.

...love is the sum of our choices, the strength of our commitments, the ties that bind us together.

Maybe the thing to do after you roll the dice-and lose-is simply pick them up and roll them again.

When you’re in love, sometimes you have to swallow your pride, and sometimes you have to keep your pride. It’s a balance. But when the relationship is right, you find the balance.

I think of how each person in a marriage owes it to the other to find individual happiness, even in a shared life. That this is the only way to grow together, instead of apart.

Life's not black-and-white. Sometimes the ends justifies the means.

Although I'm sure there are plenty of tall, gorgeous, life-of-the-party guys who are also true to their wives, I happen to believe that a disproportionate number of them are cheaters.

I think it's important to try to be present with whatever it is you're doing. And if you can't be present, take a break.

your lack of hard work fails your destiny and not the destiny fails you.

At best, the natural good-nature is edged with complaint or has changed into sullenness and gloom. And now and then it blazes forth in veiled but hot anger.

One afternoon, I am complaining about the confusion of my age, what is expected of me versus what I want for myself.

Born to be wild - live to outgrow it.

Politics is a profession; a serious, complicated and, in its true sense, a noble one.

Every man must wear out at least one pair of fools shoes.

Dream a dream so big that unless God intervenes it will fail.

If we continue as we have for the past 20 years in California, in the year 2020, everybody in the State will either be in prison or running one.

To increase aid to the Pakistan government when religious freedom is not upheld is tantamount to an anti-Christian foreign policy.

Don't worry about losing. Think about winning.