Outlining is like putting on training wheels. It gives me the courage to write, but we always go off the outline.

The truth is rarely as dreadful or as terrifying as what one imagines.

For me, a good YA novel is the best kind of comfort food.

I was an outsider, never quite part of what was going on, always looking in. It turned out to be great preparation for writing fiction.

Write what you care about, what interests and intrigues you.

The book that made a lasting impression was the one my mother gave each of us when she decided we were ready for our first "adult novel," Lucy Maud Montgomery's The Blue Castle.

A man notices a womans figure when she walks in a room. Women have eight million words for blue; a man says dark blue or light blue.

Our house was awash in books, and my mother doled out her favorites like they were special treats - which they were.

Phoebe Wolkind Ephron cracked wise like Dorothy Parker and looked like Katharine Hepburn.

My rule of writing is that no one can do what you can do, so jealousy or competitiveness are pointless. I am always happy when one of my sisters has a book published that I get to read.

And I didn't think even eternity would be long enough to fix me.

Sometimes you wonder why the only luck we have is bad luck. But you move on.

It's so much easier to pray for a bore than to go and see one.

I don't have to prove anything.

My sunglasses are like my guitar.

If I spend a year and a half writing a script, the first year will be outlining in notebooks. It's just the way I work, definitely not necessarily the best way.

I'm not 40 yet. I wouldn't even bother comparing myself to Chaplin.

I'm very devoted to my kids - I'm completely blind to their faults.

Those who have no power to judge of past times but by their own, should always doubt their conclusions

Relativity must replace absolutism in the realm of morals as well as in the spheres of physics and biology.