I try to stress to my children that buying something never leads to true happiness.

A novel is like a sausage. You might like the final taste but you don't want to see how it was made.

Painful memories didn't just ease back in-they shoved the door open hard, all of them and all at once

In real life, coincidences happen all the time. In novels, they are leapt upon with fury.

I like to see the difference between good and evil as kind of like the foul line at a baseball game. It's very thin, it's made of something very flimsy like lime, and if you cross it, it really starts to blur where fair becomes foul and foul becomes fair.

The most annoying and full- of- crap thing a writer says is, I write only for myself, I don't care if anyone reads it. A writer without a reader doesn't exist.

I'm a little bit of a control freak.