Children are the brightest treasures we bring forth into this world, but too large a percentage of the population continues to treat them as inconveniences and nuisances, when they're not treating them as possessions or toys.

Beauty isn't what you see on TV or in magazine ads or even necessarily in art galleries. It's a lot deeper and a lot simpler than that. It's realizing the goodness of things, it's leaving the world a little better than it was before you got here. It's appreciating the inspiration of the world around you and trying to inspire others.

I've always been interested in the outsider.

There's never an easy route to the things that matter.

Write from the heart, what has meaning to you personally; have the patience and discipline to sit down and do it every day whether you're feeling inspired or not; never be afraid to take chances, in fact, make sure you take chances. As soon as you become complacent, you become boring ... . Read as much as possible, not simply in the genre, or what you think you're interested in, but other things as well.

Not everything has to mean something. Some things just are.

I wouldn't like to live in a world where everything's as cut-and-dried as most people think it is