Believe in yourself and you can achieve greatness in your life.

[Writing] totally changed my life. It gave me my life. Everything opened up.

The best books come from someplace inside. You don't write because you want to, but because you have to.

Let children read whatever they want and then talk about it with them. If parents and kids can talk together, we won't have as much censorship because we won't have as much fear.

When I was growing up, I dreamed about becoming a cowgirl, a detective, a spy, a great actress, or a ballerina. Not a dentist, like my father, or a homemaker, like my mother - and certainly not a writer, although I always loved to read.

Nothing teaches you as much about writing dialogue as listening to it.

[When I was a kid] I was a surgeon, amputating legs and arms of my paper dolls. And I had a little board with little tacks that I would tack them down to do this.