You can never control how people respond to your work. You can only control your own work ethic.

When you leave here today and commence the next stage of your life, you can follow someone else's script, try to make choices that will make other people happy, avoid discomfort, do what is expected, and copy the status quo. Or you can look at all that you have accomplished today and use it as fuel to venture forth and write your own story. If you do, amazing things will take shape.

I think everything in life happens for a reason. I always think there's room for me to improve as a person.

I've always been a writer because I've always been a student. My mom's a retired professor, so I come from a very academic background. I love writing, you know?

Whenever I talk to survivors [of a domestic abuse relationship] who have lived through that and are on the other side and their whole perspective on life is a complete 180, I'm just so inspired.

As long as anyone anywhere is being made to feel less human, our very definition of humanity is at stake, and we are all vulnerable.

I didn't grow up thinking I was pretty; there was always a prettier girl than me. So I learned to be smart and tried to be funny and develop the inside of me, because I felt like that's what I had.