To be honest, I want readers to be wrung out. As a novelist, I don't have a political agenda or specific philosophy; I'm trying to create a gut-wrenching, intimate, memorable experience.

My only relief is to sleep. When I'm sleeping, I'm not sad, I'm not angry, I'm not lonely, I'm nothing.

Sometimes you have to say, 'Today's just not my day.

My entire life has been centered around my writing, and by that I mean finding the time to write.

Part of what compels me to write day after day, chapter after chapter, is the discovery process, seeing the characters evolve as I get deeper and deeper into the story.

What I like to do and what I have to do are two separate things. I like to read, swim, watch TV, spend time with my family. But I have to work, so I do that.

To be perfectly frank: I don't write women's fiction. I write intimate, gritty, realistic, character-driven fiction that happens to be thrown into the women's fiction category.

I think there's an unnatural amount of social pressure on women, particularly mothers, to conform to certain standards of behavior, particularly in regard to our children.

I've always been a writer who tackles complex themes and risky subjects - I write about the things that people think but never say aloud.

I love it, I hate it, it's ecstasy when I'm writing well, it's despair when I'm not. I wouldn't wish this life on anyone, nor would I, could I, ever give it up.

I hope I'll keep people up at night, unable to stop turning pages. That's my goal: exhausted, emotionally drained readers who can't stop crying.

The darkest part of the storm paints the brightest part of the rainbow.

His blank face communicated an emptiness that could never be filled"- Frank Balenger

There was darkness, and monsters vast as worlds swam in it.

When one is learning one should not think of play and when one is at play one should not think of learning.

No matter how far back you cut a willow tree, it will never really die.

Giving interviews is the most difficult thing about being a gymnast.

A true crisis. Class 3 outbreaks, more than any other, demonstrate the clear threat posed by the living dead. Zombies will number in the thousands, encompassing an area of several hundred miles.

There will be a meeting of the great powers who will disagree, and the next noise we hear will be the screeching of elevators going up and down from heaven to hell.

I'm like John Wayne. I only play good guys. Describing his cameo role on a TV series.

A romantic striving for an impossible ideal.