The four sayings that lead to wisdom are: ‘I was wrong,’ ‘I’m sorry,’ ‘I don’t know’ and ‘I need help.’
Fear lives in the head. And courage lives in the heart. The job is to get from one to the other.
He tried to let her know it would be all right. Eventually. Life wouldn’t always be this painful. The world wouldn’t always be this brutal. Give it time, little one. Give it another chance. Come back.
Things are strongest where they’re broken.
The leaves had fallen from the trees and lay crisp and crackling beneath his feet. Picking one up he marveled, not for the first time, at the perfection of nature where leaves were most beautiful at the very end of their lives.
It is very, very dangerous to come between a person and their beliefs.
Or – perhaps – I should just worry about my own behavior and let others be who they are.
I went through a period in my life when I had no friends, when the phone never rang, when I thought I would die from loneliness. I know that the real blessing here isn’t that I have a book published, but that I have so many people to thank.
Don’t mistake dramatics for a conscience.
The night is a strawberry.
What people mistook for safety was in fact captivity.
I turned down all the requests for the rights to the books, for years, mostly because they wanted the rights to the characters, and to turn it into a TV series. This would have allowed them to do anything they wanted with the characters, and that just wasn’t an option for me.
I’ve seen enough successful writers who no longer seem to care when they are recognized with an award, and I think that’s just tragic.
A good novel is a good novel, pointe finale. And I think what I’m writing is exactly that.
To be honest, the only thing I ever really wanted to be was a writer – since I read ‘Charlotte’s Web’ as a child.
Foolish people are never harmless. Stupidity accounts for as many crimes as anger and greed.
How much more courage it took to be kind than to be cruel.
Winning doesn’t mean my book is better than anyone else’s. It means I’m very fortunate. And I should be very, very aware of that. And grateful.
A good journalist, as you know, is a great listener. And so’s a good writer. And I got to listen to people for almost 20 years. That serves me well, I hope, when I try to understand how a character might be feeling, or how they might react.
I had to learn compassion. Had to learn what it felt like to hate, and to forgive and to love and be loved. And to lose people close to me. Had to feel deep loneliness and sorrow. And then I could write.