When you love what you do, it stops seeming like work and instead becomes necessity.

Open adoption, when it works, is fabulous. But when it goes wrong, it's so traumatizing for everybody.

Writers are magpies, and we collect details about people and we use them for fictional characters.

I had a nervous breakdown at 17 when my first love left me, and he was a typical bad boy, albeit a charismatic one, with a string of broken hearts trailing behind him.

Do what you love. Live fearlessly and take risks. Don't take no for an answer from anyone - go ahead and prove the naysayers wrong. Believe that anything can be possible.

I always think that in a big city, anything is possible, including reinventing yourself.

Everyone thinks that a new place or a new identity will jumpstart a new life.

I was a bookworm who aced every test - until third grade, when my teacher handed out a pop quiz about Jesus and the Apostles.

L.A. is a place people come to for all sorts of reasons, often to reinvent themselves, and that fascinates me.

My first husband was a serial cheater.

Never be with anyone you couldn't imagine yourself being able to live without.

I would not wish to marry someone who had already been married. It would be, ' she opined, 'like having someone else break in one's own pony.

The next best thing after finishing writing a chapter is starting a new one.

The soul of this man is his clothes.

I have always attempted to create images that deliver the maximum amount of information about the subject.

I only miss you when I'm breathing.

Envy's a sharper spur than pay: No author ever spar'd a brother; Wits are gamecocks to one another.

I have always been into music ever since I was a kid.

My heroes are and were my parents. I can't see having anyone else as my heroes.

Laws, however divine in origin and institution, would be found of little coercion among men, were the administration of them not committed to mortals.