Writing is the only place I can be myself and not feel judged.

We never thought some guy would deliberately fill our hearts with brown sugar and then pour hot water all over it.

Parents can ruin children, and sometimes that's a learned behavior. Sometimes you can't blame your parents for it, sometimes you can. I think to me, that's what the whole paradox is, is people that have children that don't even know how to raise them.

I like to think of what happens to characters in good novels and stories as knots--things keep knotting up. And by the end of the story--readers see an unknotting of sorts. Not what you expect, not the easy answers you get on TV, not wash and wear philosophies, but a reproduction of believable, emotional experiences.

We get divorce, we get conned, someone we love dies, or we can't find anybody to love us or somebody breaks our heart and we realize this fairy tale ain't fair. So we suffer.

Writing is the only place I can be myself and not feel judged.

I would like to think that as a result of not just my own experiences, but at least being empathetic and compassionate about other people's experiences and plights and tragedies, that I am affected by it and learn from it.