Emily Brontë's "Wuthering Heights" was extremely important to me.

I never even believed in happiness. I didn't think it existed. Now look at me. I'm ready to believe in just about anything.

Trouble is just like love, after all; it comes in unannounced and takes over before you've had a chance to reconsider, or even to think.

If every life is a river, then it's little wonder that we do not even notice the changes that occur until we are far out in the darkest sea. One day you look around and nothing is familiar, not even your own face. My name once meant daughter, grandaughter, friend, sister, beloved. Now those words mean only what their letters spell out; Star in the night sky. Truth in the darkness. I have crossed over to a place where I never thought I'd be. I am someone I would have never imagined. A secret. A dream. I am this, body and soul. Burn me. Drown me. Tell me lies. I will still be who I am.

I hate it when people tell me the end of the story because my mother always read the last page of a novel first to see whether she wanted to read it. It was a strange reading habit.

Do people choose the art that inspires them — do they think it over, decide they might prefer the fabulous to the real? For me, it was those early readings of fairy tales that made me who I was as a reader and, later on, as a storyteller.

I'm much faster now. When you only have a certain amount of time to write, after a while you learn to use your time well or you stop writing