Feel lucky for what you have when you have it. Isn’t that the point? Happily ever after doesn’t mean happy forever.
You build your world around someone, and then what happens when he disappears? Where do you go-into pieces, into atoms, into the arms of another man? You go shopping, you cook dinner, you work odd hours, you make love to someone else on June nights. But you’re not really there.
My mother’s blood that would last forever after. The blood of my brother, my grandfather, my father.
No barrier was strong enough to keep out the movement of time.
I can’t really work on more than one thing at a time.
Outside, the September air was enticingly fragrant, yellow with pollen and rich, lemony sunlight.
I really feel like the gift is also the curse. It’s always half-and-half. Whatever brings you the most joy will also probably bring you the most pain. Always a price to pay.
Any institution becomes a community – whether it’s a high school or a boarding school or a publishing company or a small town where everybody knows certain things about people.
After a while, the characters I’m writing begin to feel real to me. That’s when I know I’m heading in the right direction.
Ironically, now that my children are older and gone quite a bit, I find it harder to work when they’re not around. Too much free time!
It was as if hope had appeared out of nowhere to settle beside her and it wasn’t going anywhere, it wasn’t going to desert her now.
I’ve been a screenwriter for twenty-five years. Every one of my books have been optioned for movies and I have written a few of those screenplays.
When I write for teens, I feel I can cut through everything and get to the bare bones. I can get straight into the emotional world of the character.
Being an outsider is the one thing we all have in common.
I think growing up is difficult and it’s a process that I’m always interested in, with kids and adults, they are often on two different universes.
The original fairy tale was about the youngest sister going into a room in the castle and finding all the bodies of the wives that came before her – she is confronted with truth, thinking about how often we think we know people and we really don’t.
It’s not finding what’s lost, it’s understanding what you’ve found.
I wasn’t good company, that was true, and people avoided me, but that was all right. I was too busy dreaming.
Holding a tear back makes them drain upward, higher and higher, until one day your head just explodes and you’re left with a stub of a neck and nothing more.
A boy who is trouble is something entirely different as a man.