And still she felt more confident at the prospect of taking on the Russian Mafia than she did attending a backyard barbecue.

And yet, anything real, anything strong, was never easy. She'd been taught from an early age that the things that mattered most were the hardest to obtain.

Even a good place gets to be a rut, especially if you're standing in it alone... Alone and lonely have the same root.

I think writer is a word without gender, and a good writer observes, absorbs, hopefully empathizes then translates that into character and story. You don’t have to do or be or have experienced, traveled to, but you have to imagine all of that, very well–and believe it completely during the bubble of the work.

Once you considered failure you were one step farther away from success.

He pulled himself out of hard times, dealt with the scars from it, pushed himself to make a mark. A little bit of the wild side there, always. I told myself, oh no, I won't get tangled up with this one. And I said it again, even when I was tangled up.

If love doesn't make a fool of us, what will?