“Don't use your advance to buy an antique sports car, diamonds by the yard, or a bottle of wine from Thomas Jefferson's cellar instead of investing in your book.”

“I was taught to think outside the box. Before my grandfather was one of the original Mad Men, he and a group of other Air Force Intelligence officers formalized brainstorming as a problem solving t...”

“I think Paris smells not just sweet but melancholy and curious, sometimes sad but always enticing and seductive. She's a city for the all senses, for artists and writers and musicians and dreamers,...”

“And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”

“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”

“The road to hell is paved with adverbs.”

“nights and days came and passedand summer and winterand the sun and the windand the rain.and it was good to be a little islanda part of the worldand a world of its ownall surrounded by the bright b...”

“When you drop a glass or a plate to the ground it makes a loud crashing sound. When a window shatters a table leg breaks or when a picture falls off the wall it makes a noise. But as for your heart...”

“A good friend of mine once said, "I have never met a bigot who was a reader as a child.”

“My parents' work ethic amazed me. How could they put in such long hours, day after day?Part of the reason was to keep the family going - to keep me going. I realized that, although we had different...”

“We were very different, and we disagreed about a lot of things, but he was always so interesting, you know?”

“We were more alike than any of the others, neither of us quite human and both hated by the two species we drifted between.”