No one can grant you happiness. Happiness is a choice we all have the power to make.

Bunny slippers remind me of who I am.You can't get a swelled head if you wear bunny slippers. You can't lose your sense of perspective and start acting like a star or a rich lady if you keep on wearing bunny slippers. Besides, bunny slippers give me confidence because they're so jaunty. They make a statement; they say, 'Nothing the world does to me can ever get me so far down that I can't be silly and frivolous.

Writing a novel is like making love, but it's also like having a tooth pulled. Pleasure and pain. Sometimes it's like making love while having a tooth pulled.

But the more people we love and the more deeply we love them, the more vulnerable we are to loss and grief and loneliness.

I have advice for new writers, first of all, at any time in the history of publishing in my experience, there will be endless number people telling you that you can't do what you are trying to do. You won't succeed, there's something else you should be doing.

He felt ... a suspicion-no, a conviction-than he had been abandoned, forgotten, and that no one in the whole world cared or would ever care enough about him to really find out what he was like and what his dreams were. He was an outcast, a creature somehow vastly different from all other people, an object of scorn and derision, an outsider, secretly loathed and ridiculed by everyone who met him, even by those few who professed to love him.

It may sound strange, but when you're a kid and you're in that environment, for some reason for a long time you think, when the doors are closed in other houses, this is what it's like everywhere. And then at some point you begin to realize that isn't true, and books were really the educational system that showed me that there were many better and different ways to live a life.