“They do not begin to describe me. They do not begin to express what is inside of me.”

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.

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.

All writing begins in the sea of experience.

When nations are to perish in their sins, ’tis in the Church the leprosy begins.

That’s not an accident that Donald Trump didn’t begin with, say, trade or jobs or anything, that he actually began by otherizing the first African-American president of the United States.

Hank had left me his doomed army, and hed left marcie his inheritance. Unfair didnt begin to cover it.

Your power ends where your fear begins.

He who begins by loving Christianity more than Truth, will proceed by loving his sect or church better than Christianity, and end in loving himself better than all.

Autobiography begins with a sense of being alone. It is an orphan form.

I mean, I think we’re put here on earth to make your own destiny, to begin with.