I love smart commercial fiction. Susan Isaacs, for example and the readers who interest me are, in the preponderance, women. I am one of them; I like the books they like.

Well. I don't suppose you have to believe in ghosts to know that we are all haunted, all of us, by things we can see and feel and guess at, and many more things that we can't.

I became a writer because I love to read, yet I never get to unless I'm reviewing a book or doing research.

If you're going to spend two or three years immersed in a subject, you better be deeply interested in it, or it won't be interesting to the reader.

I'm very interested, in all my books, in community, what binds people together, which I think is an obvious consequence of being the fourth of six children.

How quickly a person in pain whom you can't help becomes a reproach. And then, no doubt, a thorn.

There was the world and there is you, where I belong clouds are more powerful than the sun.

Begin to write, your heart will flow with sacred words.

Stupidity is doomed, therefore, to cringeat every syllableof wisdom.

I race to win. If I am on the bike or in a car it will always be the same.

Devout Christians are destined to be regarded as fools in modern society. We are fools for Christ's sake. We must pray for courage to endure the scorn of the sophisticated world.

There's a lot of exhibitionists who want to tell their stories anonymously and there's a whole lot of voyeurs who want to feel like a fly on the wall and hear about people's lives.

We are social animals. Others' suffering is ultimately your suffering; their happiness is ultimately your happiness.

The chief aim of Interpretation is not instruction, but provocation.

Meditation is a tool to shake yourself awake. A way to discover what you love. A practice to return yourself to your body when the mind medleys threaten to usurp your sanity.

I've participated in meetings where there were concerns by ethical experts. There is no clear solution.