I hope and pray that despite an unhealed past full of atrocities and deep divisions in the present, God can and will make "the distant near" and a "brother of the stranger" in America's future.

American and Vietnamese characters alike leap to life through the voice and eyes of a tenyearold girl-a protagonist so strong, loving, and vivid I longed to hand her a wedge of freshly cut papaya.

I learned to read when I was three, so I skipped right over picture books and didn't learn to appreciate art in books until much later.

Good humor pokes fun at the powerful — not the weak.

We adults all stay sixteen or so in some corner of the soul.

Research is always a high priority in my fiction. Songs, fashion, politics, television, movies, trends - I try to get those details right.

There weren't too many books featuring other cultures and countries when I was growing up as an immigrant kid here in the States.

If you have a chance to see Children Of War, you can watch expert trauma counselors try to help bring healing to young people who have experienced atrocities in conflict.

Every organism requires an environment of friends partly to shield it from violent changes and partly to supply it with its wants.

Positive Thinking Is Practical There is in the worst of fortune the best of chances for a happy change.

With couture, you feel obligated to design something modern each season, but with Theyskens Theory, I don't question anything. I'm thinking of what I'd like to wear.

You can’t go the distance with too much resistance

If you have not been a villain at a certain point in time, you will never be a hero. And the day you are a hero, you may become a villain the next day.

They eviscerated the book by making it an action movie for young people aged 15 to 25, and it seems that The Hobbit will be the same kind of film.

If it isn't a clear yes, then it's a clear no.

We grow with years more fragile in body, but morally stutter, and can throw off the chill of a bad conscience almost at once.

I'm not cheap, you understand, I'm just a cut price person in a low budget land.

I wake up every morning believing today is going to be better than yesterday.