No matter when you were born or where, puberty is the same. It's the same for your parents as it is for you - what's happening in your body dictates everything.

She needed to get out of there. Her brains, thankfully, were still safely in her skull, but her emotions were splattered on the pavement.

I get some of my ideas from watching my three daughters, but most of them come from my own memories of growing up. I can remember how romantic I was, not just about love, but romance in the classic sense - the romantic ideals: of honor and truth, of loyalty, sacrifice and fairness. Those were the elements that made a story satisfying to me.

Life's one great lesson was: Do not care. Not caring was a person's real protection.

Ella's supersonic voice followed her all the way to Bleecker Street and then dissolved amid the noisy profusion of shops, cafes, and restaurants and the crush of people that made the West Village of Manhattan unique in the world. In a single block you could buy fertility statues from Tanzania, rare Amazonian orchids, a pawned brass tuba, Krispy Kreme doughnuts, or the best, most expensive cup of coffee you ever tasted. It was the doughnuts, incidentally, that attracted Gaia.

Since I was a small child, I was always writing either poems or plays... plays in which I had the starring part.

Luck doesn't shine her light on each of us equally. She is arbitrary, irrational, unfair and sometimes downright cruel.