I'd say my sound's really rooted in Jamaica and Barbados heritage , infused with just me growing up in Brooklyn, really, and being an American kid.

Divorce isn't such a tragedy. A tragedy's staying in an unhappy marriage, teaching your children the wrong things about love. Nobody ever died of divorce.

There's nothing wrong with reading a book you love over and over. When you do, the words get inside you, become a part of you, in a way that words in a book you've read only once can't.

When you become a teenager, you step onto a bridge. You may already be on it. The opposite shore is adulthood. Childhood lies behind. The bridge is made of wood. As you cross, it burns behind you

There are few overnight successes and many up-all-night successes.

There are days when I think I don't believe anymore. When I think I've grown too old for miracles. And that's right when another seems to happen.

Sure, it was your idea and your fly, but he caught the big fish. Remember, fairness is a human idea largely unknown in nature.

When I write, I make discoveries about my feelings.

Sometimes you simply made the wrong choice and you had to live with it. You could only change the future.

My mind corrupted but my heart is still pure

He who would learn to fly one day must first learn to walk and run and climb and dance

You can use songs, scriptures and godly pictures to chart your thought-course in the right direction.

I haven't looked at marriage in the conventional sense, as far as settling down. I look at it as putting faith in another person, which has always been hard for me to do.

Love does not care to define and is never in a hurry to do so.

We're going to have a very, very robust, level of performance having to do with mental health. We are losing so many great people that can be taken care of if they have proper care.

Mercy Watson is pure fun for me as a writer, because I think of her as kind of sorbet - a palate cleanser - between larger works. It's always a relief to come back to her.

Most allopathic doctors think practitioners of alternative medicine are all quacks. They're not. Often they're sharp people who think differently about disease.

If you can't be what you want, you learn to be the thing's you're not

I think one of the biggest mistakes you can make as a writer is to follow your initial [writing] plan too stringently. A story needs room to grow and evolve.

Maybe under all that guilt and certainty that he couldn't love again, he still wanted me. I would have liked to have found out. But I didn't have the time. Instead, I punched him.

One thing it takes to accomplish something is courage.