It's funny, we started writing chick-lit when it was just becoming a crowded marketplace, and now the same thing is happening with YA. It really used to just be one shelf at the library - Nancy Drew and Judy Blume.
Sometimes you have to take the focus off of you and put it on someone else and it's funny what you can accomplish and how much strength you really have.
It took me eight books to finally be at a point in my career where I could come out with a book and say, 'This is meant to be a funny book,' and we didn't have to make any bones about it.
I think the most important thing journalism taught me is to mine for details. The details are key. You can't try to be funny or strange or poignant; you have to let the details be funny or strange or poignant for you.
I have to tell you I enjoy Jon Stewart. That's the truth. I actually think he's very funny. I've paid to see him do his stand-up routine.
I really like writing heroes who aren't necessarily 'Hollywood handsome.' Personally, I think men who are self-confident, intelligent, and funny are outrageously attractive - and my heroines tend to think that, too!
I try to write stories that are thrilling and full of mystery and funny all at the same time, stories that raise moral questions but come up with very few moral answers, stories that emotionally touch readers through the characters.
Knowing that you're the one who's been rejected, God it makes you feel isolated. I defy anybody not to be a bit upset. I felt as though I'd walked into the house trailing all this baggage.
You don't have to be Sigmund Freud to surmise that war has a perverse appeal for the human race, nor is the attraction limited to religious fanatics committing mass murder and suicide for the greater glory of God.
I just really like Houston despite its craziness. There is a sense of energy and a kind of excitement, 'We're going places and God knows what'll happen next.' It's very interesting. It's very exciting.
There are things about our world that almost by their nature defy our ability to comprehend them. Some people use a religious register to deal with that - they call it God and that's a way of domesticating it.
I see so many people get so wrapped up in wanting to get a bigger SUV or a bigger house. But then I think, 'My God, I could have been born a woman in the Congo.'
Now let me say that Matt Busby was a great manager and Manchester United wouldn't be where they are without him. He was a god at the club, but he wasn't a god to me. Football is like that sometimes.
Every presidential candidate highlights patriotism, but Mr. Romney's is backed by the Mormon belief that the United States was chosen by God to play a special role in history, its Constitution divinely inspired.
Writing is my therapy. In addition to my real therapy. God knows where I'd be without it. I'd probably still be at my last job, working in HR at a religious organization. I was horribly miscast.
And as far as doing God's work, I think the bankers who took government money and then gave out obscene bonuses are the same self-interested sorts Jesus threw out of the temple.
I've lost count of the number of times that I've been approached by strangers wanting to tell me that they think I'm brave or inspirational, and this was long before my work had any kind of public profile.
But I now entered on my fifteenth year - a sad epoch in the life of a slave girl. My master began to whisper foul words in my ear. Young as I was, I could not remain ignorant of their import.
War, famine, poverty and oppression of the workers will continue while woman makes life cheap. They will cease only when she limits her reproductivity and human life is no longer a thing to be wasted.
There are several authors who are also lawyers - and not only the ones who write legal thrillers. There are other attorneys who write romantic fiction, and I know of at least one who writes young adult books.
I have terrible handwriting. I now say it's a learning disability... but a nun who was a very troubled woman hit me over the fingers with a ruler because my writing was so bad.
