Sometimes you never feel meaner than the moment you stop being mean. It's like how turning on a light makes you realize how dark the room had gotten. And the way you usually act, the things you would have normally done, are like these ghosts that everyone can see but pretends not to.

I feel lucky that I read so many books as a kid because I know that no matter how much I appreciate a book now, and I can love a book very much, it's never going to be that childhood passion for a book. There's some element, something special about the way they're reading books and experiencing books that's finite.

When something works for you, all you can do is cross your fingers and hope that it will work for someone else.

Nice tights," I snorted. Or I tried to snort, anyway. I'm not exactly sure how, though people in books are always doing it.

I remember in junior high school, which is what we called it, suddenly I was looking at myself, almost through other people's eyes, and thought: how does the world see me? So that was one of the things I was really interested in, when I was writing Goodbye Stranger.

Many of the books on my list are, in my opinion, amazing. Some I didn't like. But I give them all five stars, because stars make people - including me -- happy.

The writing process is not just putting down one page after another-it's a lot of writing and then rewriting, restructuring the story, changing the way things come together.