“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.”

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.

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

How childish to think that could be easy.

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

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.

Ireland has never been more beautiful – the perfect setting for this story filled with humor, hope and possibility.

Nothing. The Infinite knows no time, no space, no great, no small, no beginning, no end.

I didn’t know Dan Wheldon, but he was big in motorsport, and then this year I got to know Marco Simoncelli, so our thoughts are with them at the moment.

Anybody who knows me… when I’m tired, I sleep with my eyes open.

I know only two tunes: one of them is ‘Yankee Doodle’, and the other isn’t.

What is a scientist after all? It is a curious man looking through a keyhole, the keyhole of nature, trying to know what’s going on.

In my life, I’ve seen everything, and one thing I know for sure is you can’t win in the federal court.

I know I’m not the only guy that’s had problems in life. And it seems to me that a lot of athletes shy away from talking about things that may have happened to them or their families.

Too bad that all the people who know how to run the country are busy driving taxicabs and cutting hair.