Cooking is 80 percent confidence, a skill best acquired starting from when the apron strings wrap around you twice.

When you pick up a novel from the bed side table, you put down your own life at the same time and you become another person for the duration.

He warned Mother not to flout God's Will by expecting too much of us. "Sending a girl to college is like pouring water in your shoes,' he still loves to say, as often as possible. 'It's hard to say which is worse, seeing it run out and waste the water, or seeing it hold in and wreck the shoes.

Recall that whatever lofty things you might accomplish today, you will do them only because you first ate something that grew out of the dirt.

I know people. Most have no earthly notion of the price of a snow-white conscience.

Back then I was still appalled that God would set down his barefoot boy and girl dollies into an Eden where, presumably, He had just turned loose elephantiasis and microes that eat the human cornea. Now I understand, God is not just rooting fo the dollies.

What keeps me awake at the wheel is the thrill of trying something completely new with each book. I’m not a risk-taker in life, generally speaking, but as a writer I definitely choose the fast car, the impossible rock face, the free fall.