Writing is communication, not self-expression. Nobody in this world wants to read your diary except your mother.

I caught a glimpse of happiness, and saw it was a bird on a branch, fixing to take wing.

We don't write what we know. We write what we wonder about.

If you cannot find yourself on the page very early in life, you will go looking for yourself in all the wrong places.

[A young adult novel] ends not with happily ever after, but at a new beginning, with the sense of a lot of life yet to be lived.

The only way you can write is by the light of the bridges burning behind you.

The years went by, and Mary Alice and I grew up, Slower than we wanted to, faster than we realized.