I like to think I'm helping them by hating them. I'm reminding them that they aren't God's gift to humankind.

To me, when someone wrongs you, you both share the burden of that wrongdoing—the pain of it weighs on both of you. Forgiveness, then, means choosing to bear the full weight all by yourself.

We don't know what's happened out there since they put us in here, or how many generations have lived and died since they did.We could be the last people left.

I should wonder what courage—which is the virtue they most value—has to do with a metal ring through your nostril.

Living without virtues is to live divorced from society, seperated from the most important thing in life, community.

I think romance is friendship and attraction sort of meeting together and that does influence what I'm writing a lot. I try to establish the attraction, obviously, but I also think it's important to show the characters having actual conversations about things other than their feelings for each other - and to develop their friendship on the page.

When you're a writer, you hear your internal critic, and that's really hard to get over. And then sometimes you hear critiques from classmates and stuff. But when a book comes out, it's just hundreds of opinions and you have to learn to separate out the ones you want to listen to or figure out many you want to listen to.