Did you ever walk through a room that's packed with people, and feel so lonely you can hardly take the next step?

Why is it that only in the very beginnings of a relationship are you aware of the heat coming from inside a person, of the number of inches you would have to move for your shoulders to brush as if it were an accident?

I think there are readers out there and I don't think the book is dead. And more importantly I don't think readers have to choose between literary and commercial fiction.

What makes you walk past thirty-thousand people without a second glance, and then you look at the thirty-thousandth-and-first person and know you'll never take your eyes off her again?

Families were never what you wanted them to be. We all wanted what we couldn't have: the perfect child, the doting husband, the mother who wouldn't let go. We live in our grown-up dollhouses completely unaware that, at any moment, a hand might come in and change around everything we'd become accustomed to.

You need to learn to write on demand, and to get critiqued without flinching. When someone can rip your work to shreds without it feeling as though your arm has been hacked off, you're ready to send your novel off to an agent.

I can get 400 pages down the road and still not know the answer. What I do know is that I have really examined every facet of the situation, and I may not have changed my opinion but I have definitely forced myself to explore why it's my opinion.