Years fly by, but the heart stays in the same place.

You bring your own weather to the picnic.

The ugliest truth, in the end, was still better than the prettiest of lies.

Only bad writers think they're good.

Hope can be the most wonderful thing in the world or it can crush your heart like an eggshell.

..."better to have loved and lost" bullshit. Don't show me paradise and then burn it down.

There are three things that make a person a writer: inspiration, perspiration and desperation.

Trust is like that. You can break it for a good reason. But it still remains broken.

This is the price you pay for having a great father. You get the wonder, the joy, the tender moments - and you get the tears at the end, too.

A novel is like a sausage. You might like the final taste but you don't want to see how it was made.

Sometimes the loudest cries for help are silent.

Excellence is the best ink with which to make your mark in the world.

What is your one-sentence job description?

You only have so much time in life so everything you do needs to mean something to you.

The Army, as usual, are without pay; and a great part of the soldiery without shirts; and though the patience of them is equally threadbare, the States seem perfectly indifferent to their cries.

To the innocent there are neither cherubim nor angels.

I flatter myself [we] have in this country extinguished forever the ambitious hope of making laws for the human mind.

There is no job description for the first lady and she's only there because her husband got elected president.

God is faithful; he will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear. But when you are tempted, he will also provide a way out so that you can endure it.

I am not trying to be a historian and a dramatist; I'm a dramatist, a dramatic historian, or one who does a dramatic interpretation of history.

Like my father before me, I'm a very passionate person, with boundless energy and tremedous willpower.