We adults all stay sixteen or so in some corner of the soul.

American and Vietnamese characters alike leap to life through the voice and eyes of a tenyearold girl-a protagonist so strong, loving, and vivid I longed to hand her a wedge of freshly cut papaya.

I learned to read when I was three, so I skipped right over picture books and didn't learn to appreciate art in books until much later.

Good humor pokes fun at the powerful — not the weak.

Research is always a high priority in my fiction. Songs, fashion, politics, television, movies, trends - I try to get those details right.

I hope and pray that despite an unhealed past full of atrocities and deep divisions in the present, God can and will make "the distant near" and a "brother of the stranger" in America's future.

There weren't too many books featuring other cultures and countries when I was growing up as an immigrant kid here in the States.

If you have a chance to see Children Of War, you can watch expert trauma counselors try to help bring healing to young people who have experienced atrocities in conflict.

There are no rest stops on the road of life. Otherwise they'd be congested with traffic.

So I won't hang around in my hospital shift, repeating The Black Mass and all of it. I say Live, Live because of the sun, the dream, the excitable gift.

... but as has been said, September read often, and liked it best when words did not pretend to be simple, but put on their full armor and rode out with colors flying.

I've always been fairly reserved and laid-back.

I can assure you, as a practitioner of Buddhism, that there are ten thousand states of mind, at least, give or take a few billion.

A business man's conversation should be regulated by fewer and simpler rules than any other function of the human animal. They are: Have something to say. Say it. Stop talking.

Chastity is oftener owing to diffidence and shame, than to fortitude of reason or virtue.

People will remember a good comedy song a lot longer than they would some of the so-called straight love songs.

You get to choose what you want, but you must get clear about what you want.

Carry on! Carry on! Fight the good fight and true; Believe in you mission, greet life with a cheer.