I know, from the three visits I made to him, the blended composite of love and fear that exists only in a boy's notion of his father.

If you want to bond with your friends, do something very hard with them, something that you won't be able to do alone.

...she wanted God to make sense. He doesn't. He will make no more sense to me than I will make sense to an ant.

I'm the kind of person who wants to present my most honest, authentic self to the world, so I hide backstage and rehearse honest and authentic lines until the curtain opens.

A story is a character who wants something and overcomes conflict to get it.

Before I studied story, I was trying to write a novel, and it was terrible. It wasn't going anywhere, and I couldn't figure out what I was trying to do. It was really hard; much harder than I thought it was going to be. Now that I've studied story, I think I'd have a different approach and maybe I could actually get it done.

I had some friends commenting me books, but mostly it was people I didn't know. But they're fans. They're fans of the books, so they have a working knowledge of how I write, and they know what they like and what they don't like. I'm really grateful for their feedback.