Even the bad books I write are satisfying. I'm my least critical reader.

You could say that all of life is a series of last chances.

By the time I started high school, I knew I wanted to be a writer. After graduating from Smith College in Massachusetts, I moved to New York City and worked for the advertising agency J. Walter Thompson.

Rebellion is necessary for development of character.

...When this map was made, there was only empty forest in the south," Gran told Birle."Not empty," Granda corrected her. "The forest is never empty.

If I'm writing by intuition, generally that calculation works itself out. But if I'm writing a mystery, and somebody has to have a reason for doing what he's doing, and it's not anything I can imagine myself wanting to do, things get a little more difficult to write, and careless mistakes are made.

You must not let yourself become too respectable. Keep yourself a little wild. What is life for, if not for the living of it?