No child really chooses his religion; it is just the luck of the draw which blanket of beliefs you are wrapped in.
The bigger the hole inside you, the more desperate you became to fill it.
When your existence is hell, death must be heaven.
A duck walks into a bar and the bartender asks, what’ll it be? The duck doesn’t answer because it’s a duck.
Maybe Fate isn’t the pond you swim in but the fisherman floating on top of it, letting you run the line wild until you are weary enough to be reeled back in.
Part of growing up was learning not to be quite that honest – learning when it was better to lie, rather than to hurt someone with the truth.
How could you not want to draw breath one more day? How could your own life be such a cheap commodity? But then I started to understand: when your existence is hell, death must be heaven.
Someone once told me that when you give birth to a daughter, you’ve just met the person whose hand you’ll be holding the day you die.
I wonder if, as you get older, you stop missing people so fiercely. Maybe growing up is just focusing on what you’ve got, instead of what you don’t.
But you could only remake your own future, not anyone else’s, and for some people that just wasn’t good enough.
I am not keeping my distance because it is uncomfortable for me, but because it is uncomfortable for them.
Having a fantasy come true doesn’t always mean it will be permanent.
I write adult fiction, but a good 40 to 50 per cent of my readers are teenagers. I love that if they have to grow up and move past JK Rowling they can move to me. From Jo to Jodi!
Read a ton. Take a workshop course so you learn to give and get criticism.
Writing is total grunt work. A lot of people think it’s all about sitting and waiting for the muse. I don’t buy that. It’s a job. There are days when I really want to write, days when I don’t. Every day I sit down and write.
I am an activist. I have a really big pulpit with my fiction and I love knowing that I can make people think.
Many of my books come from what if questions that I can’t answer, things that I’m worried about as either a woman, a wife, a mom, an American.
My first job was as an assistant in the local library. Self-fulfilling prophecy?
When I think about writers who use fiction as social commentary and to raise social awareness but who are also very popular, I think of Dickens.
For me it’s more important that I outline all the facets of a controversial issue and let the reader make up his or her mind. I don’t care if readers change their minds, but I would like readers to ask themselves why their opinion is what it is.