It is a terrible thing to want something you cannot have. It takes you over. I couldn't think straight because of it. There was no one else, I realized, whom I could possibly tell.

She liked the way his smile took a long time to arrive and just as long to leave.

I think it was Rose Macaulay who said, "A house unkept cannot be so distressing as a life unlived."

Two and a half thousand left-handed people are killed every year using things made for right-handed people.

Motherhood is all-encompassing, and in a way, as the mother, you're the star of the household.

As you'll know yourself, there are these moments when you're writing a book when one remark or moment will pull everything together and you'll think, "That's it. I've got what I need."

As other authors have realized, heat can have a strange effect on us, can cause odd chemical reactions in the brain. Heat can bring out secrets; it can change people's personalities.

Why isn't life better designed so it warns you when terrible things are about to happen?

She has spent most of the day reading and is feeling rather out of touch with reality, as if her own life has become insubstantial in the face of the fiction she's been absorbed in.

The Chilean novelist Isabel Allende says there's no such thing as writer's block, you just need to live a bit more. I try to bear that in mind.

I have two sisters, and I think siblings are always going to be irresistible for novelists. They have been throughout time and they'll continue to be.

What if the kid you bullied at school, grew up, and turned out to be the only surgeon who could save your life?

It is man who has abandoned God, not God who has abandoned man.

I think is sad, how easily we throw around the word without actually understanding the sacrifice behind its meaning. Love in its definition isn't about a strong feeling towards someone, but action.

Fortune, thou hadst no deity, if men Had wisdom.

I fail to see the issue that will shock the people of this great country of ours into some decisive action.

I just like making people laugh.

I thought my book was done, then we went to Hawaii and the whole last chapter happened.

Well, I am not really a conventional mom at all. Like, I had my kids really young. I had Danny when I was 18 or 19 and then Liam when I was 23 and Molly, I had when I was a little older.

If your priorities don't get scheduled into your planner, other people's priorities will get put into your planner.

The best would be to have friends who came and went away; but if I had to choose between their never coming or never going away, I think I would choose that they do not come.