“I wondered if my smile was as big as hers. Maybe as big. But not as beautiful.”

The heart can get really cold if all you’ve known is winter.

I wondered what that was like, to hold someone’s hand. I bet you could sometimes find all of the mysteries of the universe in someone’s hand.

I bring my best instincts to my work. For instance – and I come by this naturally, or I think I do – I am a very good judge of character.

But love was always something heavy for me. Something I had to carry.

I didn’t think it was my job to accept what everyone said I was and who I should be.

I don’t want to just discuss the issues – I want family to be a real part of the character of the novels I write, and I don’t like to write things that feel like issue books.

You are thirst and thirst is all I know

I wondered about the science of storms and how sometimes it seemed that a storm wanted to break the world and how the world refused to break.

Absent parents aren’t abusive per se. They’re neglectful. They love in a very imperfect way. There are parents like that, and they do love their daughters and sons, but they’re not parents in the way that we might think of it.

Mostly, I think people are fake. Well, what do you expect? The fake world we live in conspires to make us all fakes.

Water was something he loved, something he respected. He understood its beauty and its dangers. He talked about swimming as if it were a way of life.

I do that with all of my characters. They have one of the flaws I have, and I zero in on that flaw.

I think writing books is a way for me to work out certain issues. I write about what matters to me, always.

If you can quit for a day, you can quit for a lifetime.

Another secret of the universe: Sometimes pain was like a storm that came out of nowhere. The clearest summer could end in a downpour. Could end in lightning and thunder.

It’s a complex thing when you’re writing a novel, because so much of it is conscious and planned and deliberate, and so much of it is not, and it has to be a dance between the conscious and the unconscious.

I am not a pest,” Ramona Quimby told her big sister Beezus.

If you get a no from somebody, don’t say, ‘I’m going to take this as some big cosmic signal.’ No, you just got a no, deal with it. Just go to the next step.

The first big lead that I had on Broadway was in a show called La Strada.

Yes, but personally I was never a big acid head.

It was true, she thought, that the big things awe us but the little things touch us.

The Universe knows what it’s doing. So don’t develop a big ego, and don’t be afraid.

What I notice about people who are gifted in filmmaking is that they’re great thinkers. They engage with big ideas and they engage with people.

Wall Street is one big turf war. By benefiting one person you are disadvantaging another person.