It's amazing what you can accomplish when you know you have to hit the ground running.

I'd say that most of life seems to me to be that way, a mixture of the mundane and the mythic, when you're living the life of the mind.

I don't see the direct correlation between my personal life and the novel I'm writing until I'm at the end of the novel or very close to it.

As writers, we live very much in our own minds much of the time, buzzing in our unconscious spaces as we go about the business of living in the world.

I feel that if I establish the world or the premise from the first line, then I can get the reader to come with me where I want her to go.

When a certain show or film or celebrity captures the imagination of the masses that has a good deal to say about us, I think, and what is happening in our collective psyche.

I could have a lot of fun with Michael Jackson, I'm sure.

As I get older, I'm finding that I recognize certain celebrities only because they frequently grace the pages of US Weekly, but beyond that, I have no idea what they do.

I'm a pop culture junkie. I'm a People magazine reader, an US Weekly subscriber; all of those celebrity magazines get my dollar.

As a reader I gravitate toward work that rests in the gray area, that doesn't come with easy answers.

I've realized that with each novel I seem to set out a kind of puzzle for myself. And I am never sure in the process of writing a first draft how it's all going to turn out.

You have a choice. Take hold of your future or the past will take it for you.

... Nature almost surely operates by combining chance with necessity, randomness with determinism...

The seed of the gift may come, but a seedling that isn't nourished dies quickly.

Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of our own mind.

Elegance is the perfect disguise for our violent nature—a mask so convincing that we often fool ourselves the moment we don it.

Games are lost and won in your mind as much as they are on the field.

Every time you use the word 'healthy, ' you lose. The key is to make yummy, delicious food that happens to be healthy.

I believe that children are our future. Unless we stop them now.

The Tea Party has an important voice in the country and now they have a voice in the U.S. Senate.

The best use of good laws is to teach men to trample bad laws under their feet.