No offense, but if you want to be with my niece, you should think about getting a haircut. My mother is very conservative.” “No offense taken,” John said mildly.

every seven miles, in America, there is at least one McDonald's. Not a hospital, mind you, or a police station, but a McDonald's, every seven miles. I mean, that's sort of scary, if you think about it.

I actually love writing for teens best. I had such an awful time in my own teen years - I love having the chance to relive them through my fiction.

How is it that I'd nearly been smothered to death, and yet I could sit there and notice things like my stepbrother's abdominal muscles a few minutes later?

And I'm sure than in Poland, or somewhere, it is considered cool to drive a Porsche and wear necklaces and black silk, but at least back in Brooklyn if you did those things you were either a drug dealer or from New Jersey.

Courage is not the absence of fear but rather the judgement that something is more important than fear; The brave may not live forever but the cautious do not live at all.

Look, I know what you're thinking. You're thinking I said no because the whole thing would just be too Dirty Dancing , right? Summer fling at the resort, only with the roles reversed: you know, the poor working girl and the rich doctor's son, nobody puts Baby in the corner, blah blah blah. That kind of thing.