The years went by, and Mary Alice and I grew up, Slower than we wanted to, faster than we realized.

Fame is a funny thing, like a secret, both are hard to keep.

[A young adult novel] ends not with happily ever after, but at a new beginning, with the sense of a lot of life yet to be lived.

We write by the light of every story we have ever read.

The only way you can write is by the light of the bridges burning behind you.

Only the nonreader fears books.

If you cannot find yourself on the page very early in life, you will go looking for yourself in all the wrong places.

This is how you hold onto your family. You hold them with open hands so they are free to find futures of their own. It’s just that simple.

As I pen these words to leave a lasting record, I wonder myself where it all began.

Fiction isn’t what ‘was’. It’s ‘what if’?