I've been writing all my life. Even though I didn't have sort of careerist aspirations as a writer, it was very much my identity.

One thing I am learning is to slow down. Multitasking is great, but I when try to do everything at warp speed I just end up with typos and stress.

I try to find the beauty in things. On dark days, I sit in my armchair looking at clouds and I am awed at how rain is made.

I think that if you just write your characters you end up with something that people can access.

Half of what's wrong with people today is that they ain't got no place to go that makes them peaceful.

One of the things that writers worry about is finding a voice. I don't think it's a thing that you find so much as it is something that comes to you, or that presents itself.

Voice isn't fixed or unmalleable, it adapts to the characters you are creating and the story being told. I suppose in some way that's true in life - a little flexibility goes a long way.

Even if you don't feel like sitting down to write or working on that big proposal, or whatever it is, just show up anyhow and the rest will follow.

Fiction writing is an act of imagination, lived experience is secondary in many ways, writing a novel really is all about inventing worlds and people.

All of us, writers and non-writers alike, have incredible well-springs of personal experience and history. And we also have imagination - which I think is a kind of human miracle.

The correlations between real life experience and the storylines in novels are never as direct or simple as they might seem.

New hair, new clothes-the classic relationship break-up makeover, " Jake said. breaking up with Sam. He just didn't know it.

I got a gymnastics scholarship to college, fell in love with my true love of my whole life - who I'm married to now - and he was a virgin too. It was very romantic.

Storylines are how characters create the plots involved in their stories.

Hermès and my own brand share the same philosophy, the same vision of women, but the two aren't identical.

My philosophy in life... is to prove myself to myself and not to others. I tried to teach my children that, that I have to respect myself, to prove to myself that I can do the best I can.

I don't like stories where I'm being given pages and pages of detail.

Nothing good was ever learned from eavesdropping, so mind your business and let others mind theirs.

Love can be understood only "from the inside," as a language can be understood only by someone who speaks it, as a world can be understood only by someone who lives in it.

You may not realize this, but people have the power to change the world.

There is an enormous amount to be learned about the sea; like most wildernesses, it has great potential.