I don't like coming home. It keeps me from being nostalgic, which by nature I am. Even before the plane begins its descent, I find myself dreading the questions left unanswered by my childhood.

All stories teach us something, and promise us something, whether they're true or invented, legend or fact.

You couldn't relive your life, skipping the awful parts, without losing what made it worthwhile. You had to accept it as a whole--like the world, or the person you loved.

The happiest she'd ever been was with him, and the saddest. Was that the true test of love?

The two hardest things about writing are starting and not stopping.

Getting inside your character's head and letting the reader see the world through not just their eyes but their sensibility creates an intimacy that can't be duplicated in any other medium.

The sins of the Midwest: flatness, emptiness, a necessary acceptance of the familiar. Where is the romance in being buried alive? In growing old?

The spirit of Jane Eyre looms over Once Upon a Day. Lisa Tucker keeps the plot of this gothic novel bubbling with tons of juicy family secrets.

Maybe he was old-fashioned, but to him a couple meant a strong bond, with positive and negative charges constantly arcing between them.

What man wanted a woman without fire, and vice-versa?

Why was he drawn to complicated women, or were all women--all people, finally--complicated?

The longer you chase the wrong person, the further you travel in the wrong direction. You're better than that.

Instead of a man of peace and love, I have become a man of violence and revenge.

I was influenced by the medieval theological beliefs when I presented Satan in Jesus' dream as unable to figure out who or what Jesus is, and unable to see the future.

And I think it was the outline of that church tower at Belaugh against the sky which gave me a passion for churches so that every church I've past since I've wanted to stop and look in.

We should be I hope finally realizing what Vladimir Putin is. He's an old colonel, KGB, apparatchik, and he dreams of the restoration of the Russian empire.

Every time you ask yourself where hip-hop's going, ask yourself where you're going; how are you doing?

People have always said - those words, 'too conservative,' is fairly relative. I'm sure that they probably said that about Thomas Jefferson and George Washington and Benjamin Franklin.

Even in the fiercest uproar of our stormy passions, conscience, though in her softest whispers, gives to the supremacy of rectitude the voice of an undying testimony.

I feel like movies when they work they'll find an audience.

Everybody has some good in them and they can be relied on.