None of us truly knows what we'll do when the circumstances become so overwhelming and complex that we can't even tell right from wrong.

She did know that the journey to happiness was laborious and strewn with seeds of suffering. She guessed that it was probably a place each person had to seek for herself, that each heart had to find on its own.

I can be around kids if I need to be.

Old characters never die, but I do need to take a break from them in order to create new ones.

By using novels, I show ordinary kids confronting and overcoming great odds.

Everybody dies; that's a fact. Sometimes it blindsides people. Sometimes people get a glimpse of the big picture and decide to cheat.

I wanted to write about the third world and had the opportunity to go live in the trenches, so to speak.