When I'm about to start writing, I pull up some of my all-time-favorite re-reads to feel inspired and fall headfirst into the world of beautiful words.

I'm weird - I don't really listen to American music while I'm writing. I do occasionally get an anthem song, but generally speaking, when I write, I only listen to Japanese and Hawaiian music.

I read two to three books a day anyway (I only sleep about two hours a night, and I read really fast).

I drag my husband out of bed, hook him up to a coffee to stay awake and make him listen to my plotting and any issues I may be having. I *need* his head-nodding (he's an expert head-nodder).

I'm a well-intentioned plotter who ends up with wondrous pantsing revelations and (at times) ginormous rewrites that look almost nothing like my carefully plotted plans.

While my writing does seem to ultimately have a lot to do with pantsing in the end, without the plotting, I'd get nowhere to begin with.

People not only stinks because of the odor but also because of the character.

Saying both sides participated in violence doesn't mean both sides are equally ideologically wrong, you know.

I could live a thousand years and still not know everything, still not have tried anything.

When a new saying gets to the land of empty men, they lose their heads over it.

You see the button with the guy with the tray, and you push it, and he arrives with a sandwich! And you think: "Yes! Yes! I control sandwich monkey! I live in magic land, magic land, magic land"

She turned me into a newt. ... But I got better.

The first step is to recognize what you need to know and why you need to know it.

We need to move from comparative advantage to perpetual advantage.

Some men have only one book in them, others a library.

Only when our greatest love is God, a love that we cannot lose even in death, can we face all things with peace. Grief was not to be eliminated but seasoned and buoyed up with love and hope.