Modesty is invisibility... Never forget it. To be seen - to be seen - is to be... penetrated. What you must be girls, is impenetrable.

I'm interested in the Gothic novel because it's very much a woman's form. Why is there such a wide readership for books that essentially say, 'Your husband is trying to kill you'?

By telling you anything at all I'm at least believing in you, I believe you're there, I believe you into being.

If I waited for perfection... I would never write a word.

Reading ... changes you. You aren't the same person after you've read a particular book as you were before, and you will read the next book, unless both are Harlequin Romances, in a slightly different way.

When I was 16, I started publishing all kinds of things in school magazines.

In Shakespeare Saved My Life, [author Laura Bates] said she got better papers from [prisoners] than she got from people in her regular classes. Because she was teaching, of course, Macbeth, and a number of them had murdered people. The guy who wrote the best paper said, "You do have this, 'Is this a dagger which I see before me?' before you do it, but in my case it was a gun."