I don't understand why it's a sin if you love something and want to keep it from having to suffer.

There is a gulf as wide as an ocean between should and want, and I am drowning in it.

I don't base my books on my life (thank goodness) and I don't pick the topic first. In fact, the topic picks me - via a question I can't answer as a mom, a wife, a woman, an American. I find myself wondering "What if..." and it blossoms into a whole novel.

I have always written about subjects that engage me - questions I can't answer myself. They apparently tend to be big moral and ethical issues!

She was forced to consider the startling fact that the love of her life might not actually be someone with whom she could spend a lifetime.

I think you can love a person too much. You put someone up on a pedestal, and all of a sudden, from that perspective, you notice what's wrong - a hair out of place, a run in a stocking, a broken bone. You spend all your time and energy making it right, and all the while, you are falling apart yourself. You don't even realize what you look like, how far you've deteriorated, because you only have eyes for someone else.

Once you call something a story, it's set in stone. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end that can't be transformed, because by definition, if you do that, it's not the same story anymore