It took me a sleeve of Girl Scout Thin Mints and forty minutes to get over that boy.

Don’t make stuff because you want to make money - it will never make you enough money. And don’t make stuff because you want to get famous - because you will never feel famous enough. Make gifts for people - and work hard on making those gifts in the hope that those people will notice and like the gifts.

What's the point in being alive if you don't at least try to do something remarkable? How very odd, to believe God gave you life, and yet not think that life asks more of you than watching TV.

I tried--I swear I tried. But you didn't want to hear what I was saying, and I used that as an excuse to let it go on.

In general-like not just in fiction but in life-it doesn't work out well when someone imagines someone else as a manic pixie dream girl or an Edward Cullen or anything other than a full, complex human being. That said, while I've tried to reflect that in my books, I don't think I've always succeeded, because I am always running up against my own insufficiencies and biases etc.

The thing about That Guy Is a Gigolo,' Radar says, 'I mean, the thing about it as a game, is that in the end it reveals a lot more about the person doing the imagining than it does about the person being imagined.

I always had this idea that you should never give up a happy middle in the hopes of a happy ending, because there is no such thing as a happy ending. Do you know what I mean? There is so much to lose.