I used to do everything to keep a wall up around myself and keep my life quiet so that I could write.

I have been accused of being a Pollyanna, but I think there are plenty of people dealing with the darker side of human nature, and if I am going to write about people who are kind and generous and loving and thoughtful, so what? In my life I have met astonishingly good people.

You can't be a good person when you're writing and a bad person to your husband or a bad friend.

You can't always trust what you think, what you know ... but you can always trust your nature.

I craft everything in the beginning. I know where the characters are going before I start writing the book.

I believe, in my better moments, that there is a plan and things go not the way we want them to but the way they should.

He used to say we all had a compass inside of us and what we needed to do was to find it and to follow it.