“If only men came made to order. It’s so hard to find a decent fellow.”

All you needed is what every girl needs, a good friend.

How dialogue sounds, what feels authentic and sounds real, what’s funny, how to build distinctive and original characters.

If you look around to find meaning in everything that happens you will end up disappointed.

A practical girl never pines; she takes action.

No one worries about you like your mother, and when she is gone, the world seems unsafe.

Book clubs are the best thing that has happened to the world of publishing.

I ask myself, If I knew all the answers, would it help? I lie awake and wonder why I don’t have parents and wonder what will become of my brother and me.

But a child’s joy is doubled for the mother, and the sound of her son’s laughter began to her heart.

No one knows you like the people you live with, and no one will take up your cause to the outside world quite like your blood relatives.

Someone to talk to, to share with, to run things by.

How childish to think that could be easy.

Everything has to be clean and orderly when I sit down to write.

I don’t settle in any other area of my life when it comes to excellence, so why should I lower my standards when it comes to boys?

Those who want to know the facts, and those who want to make up a nice story to feel better.

I like it when my mother smiles. And I especially like it when I make her smile.

Maybe a first love exists to reaffirm the best parts of yourself, the choices you made when you didn’t worry about the consequences.

My dad never really wrote what he thought. None of his inner rage and darkness and problems, which we all have, made it on to the page. For him, writing was a process of making everything appear funny.

Andy Warhol made fame more famous.

Forgiveness is the answer to the child’s dream of a miracle by which what is broken is made whole again, what is soiled is made clean again.

I think it is always a long shot getting a book made into a film.

What made me want to play guitar was that painting of Wings in concert in the gatefold of Wings Over America. It looked so exciting… I wanted to be part of it.

I’m a pluralist. I’ve always argued that as many different films as possible should be made.

And just about anybody you can think of who has made country music has been on that stage. That’s what makes you so nervous.

It made me perfectly happy with my own company and perhaps was good conditioning for the protracted solitude of writing books as slowly as I do.