Normally, I spend a week on the outline and take two weeks to write the book.

Read. Read. Read. Just don't read one type of book. Read different books by various authors so that you develop different styles.

Well, when I was 13, for my bar mitzvah I received my first typewriter. And that was special.

Many adults feel that every children's book has to teach them something.... My theory is a children's book... can be just for fun.

Sometimes it helps to scold yourself, to give yourself advice.

I feel happy to terrify kids.

When I write, I try to think back to what I was afraid of or what was scary to me, and try to put those feelings into books.

The only lesson is, you gotta keep at it.

Everything that has happened to me has been amazing and surprising.

Who is more irrational, the guy who believes in a God he can't see, or a guy who's offended by a God he doesn't believe in?

I've had a very sheltered life. What can happen to you if you stay home writing all day?

Media. I think I have heard of her. Isn't she the one who killed her children?

He had fallen into the error of all liberals: the belief that men are prepared to reform themselves, that good will attracts good will, that truth has leavening virtue of its own.

Which I wish to remark - And my language is plain - That for ways that are dark And for tricks that are vain The heathen Chinese is peculiar.

My stuff is my stuff. I do it for my own reasons, using my own peculiar set of guidelines. I'm not a student of the genre. I don't care what anybody else does.

A single woman, of good fortune, is always respectable, and may be as sensible and pleasant as any body else.

Some things just aren't meant to go together. Things like oil and water. Orange juice and toothpaste.

I had mostly been writing humor books, and my instinct is generally to go for the joke.

My friends and I are collecting prom dresses to give to girls who can't afford them for their proms.

I've always believed that a lot of the trouble in the world would disappear if we were talking to each other instead of about each other.

Actors are able to trick themselves into treating anything as if it's fantastic. It's a kind of madness really.