There are few things, apparently, more helpful to a writer than having once been a weird little kid.

Since my first novel was rescued from a slush pile, it makes me sad that most publishing houses no longer accept unsolicited manuscripts. Nor are many willing to take chances on novels that are not deemed immediately "marketable."

Many people are angry when they make a mistake, but very few people have the sense to be sorry.

If you're so afraid of your imagination that you stifle it, how are you going to know God? How can you imagine heaven?

You gotta know someone cares about you, or you just give up.

It's such a thrill when an adult comes up to me and says, 'I read your book as a child and really loved it.' That's a tremendous compliment.

The wonderful thing about books is that they allow us to enter imaginatively into someone else’s life. And when we do that, we learn to sympathize with other people. But the real surprise is that we also learn truths about ourselves, about our own lives, that somehow we hadn’t been able to see before.