who would dare think that, forever? Some idiot girl who wouldn’t know how things played out.

My general writing preface is to write an outline and then ignore about half of it, both on a micro level with the individual book, and on a macro level with the series as a whole, and that's pretty much what's happened.

When someone is crying, of course, the noble thing to do is to comfort them. But if someone is trying to hide their tears, it may also be noble to pretend you do not notice them.

You know I want to be a director, but you could never truly see the movies in my head and that, Ed, is why we broke up.

Normally it is not polite to go into somebody’s room without knocking, but you can make an exception if the person is dead, or pretending to be dead.

I wrote Rick before I was published, and I had no vision of it, really. It was just a story that occurred to me, and that put its little claws in my brain, and I wrote it, and I showed it to a couple people, and they all said, "This is ghastly."

A new experience can be extremely pleasurable, or extremely irritating, or somewhere in between, and you never know until you try it out.