I hope to be a good role model for my daughters.

All anyone can hope for is just a tiny bit of love, like a drop in a cup if you can get it, or a waterfall, a flood, if you can get that too.

Love is like the rain. It comes in a drizzle sometimes. Then it starts pouring and if you're not careful it will drown you.

Create dangerously, for people who read dangerously. ... Writing, knowing in part that no matter how trivial your words may seem, someday, somewhere, someone may risk his or her life to read them.

There is a frustration too, that at moments when there's not a coup, when there are not people in the streets, that the country disappears from people's consciousness.

When you write ,it's like braiding your hair. Taking a handful of coarse unruly strands and attempting to bring then unity.

It's not easy to start over in a new place,' he said. 'Exile is not for everyone. Someone has to stay behind, to receive the letters and greet family members when they come back.

People are just too hopeful, and sometimes hope is the biggest weapon of all to use against us. People will believe anything.

I think Haiti is a place that suffers so much from neglect that people only want to hear about it when it’s at its extreme. And that’s what they end up knowing about it.

Toni Cade Bambara said: “Writing is the way I participate in the struggle.”

Misery won't touch you gentle. It always leaves its thumbprints on you; sometimes it leaves them for others to see, sometimes for nobody but you to know of.

Live daring life.

The most reliable components are the ones you leave out.

I don't think the Disney Channel gives us enough credit for the age range Lizzie McGuire actually has. College students come up to me, grandparents, famous people. It's really funny.

Spring is the usual period for house-cleaning and removing the dust and dirt which, notwithstanding all precautions, will accumulate during the winter months from dust, smoke, gas, etc.

Content is the fire. Social media is the gasoline.

I first started writing fiction in college because I was attracted to beautiful sentences. I loved to read them. I wanted to write them.

Nate Silver is now forecasting Oscar winners. The only area of life in which he has no expertise, ironically, is life itself.

The first place I try to go when I have free time is the museums. I'm a big museum person.

The truth of history crowds out the truth of fiction - as if one were obliged to choose between them.