I'm also inspired by anything that I consider great. It makes me want to raise my game too - Hitchcock movies, Hopper paintings, Springsteen concerts.

You bring your own weather to the picnic.

The ugliest truth, in the end, was still better than the prettiest of lies.

Only bad writers think they're good.

Hope can be the most wonderful thing in the world or it can crush your heart like an eggshell.

..."better to have loved and lost" bullshit. Don't show me paradise and then burn it down.

There are three things that make a person a writer: inspiration, perspiration and desperation.

Trust is like that. You can break it for a good reason. But it still remains broken.

This is the price you pay for having a great father. You get the wonder, the joy, the tender moments - and you get the tears at the end, too.

A novel is like a sausage. You might like the final taste but you don't want to see how it was made.

Sometimes the loudest cries for help are silent.

Hope is a flower bud in the garden of the mind, waiting to bloom in the morning sun.

Creativity isn’t necessarily a paint-by-numbers process, more as a “connect-the-dots” adventure.

One does not have to be Witted to know the companionship of a beast, and to know that the friendship of an animal is every bit as rich and complicated as that of a man or woman.

The great artist and thinker are the simplifiers.

I come from a long line of matriarchal women, and my greatest teachers were my mothers.

The mature religious sentiment is ordinarily fashioned in the workshop of doubt.

I feel a strange, fierce squeeze in my heart when I see him, like pride, although there's nothing about Sean that I can take credit for.

I got into cooking out of self-defense.

And I like the idea of change. Because I don't see why we should hang a painting on the wall and then just not think of it anymore because it's there like a piece of furniture.

Banking is a branch of the information business.