“The best authors are both evocative AND precise. But if you prefer one over the other, who is to say what's best? Every book isn't for every person. What matters is your experience. The long and short of it is, if you like it, you like it. Some people disapprove, but they suck. End of story.”

“There have been so many interpretations of the story that I'm not going to choose between them. Make your own choice. They contradict each other, the various choices. The only choice that really matters, the only interpretation of the story, if you want one, is your own. Not your teacher's, not your professor's, not mine, not a critic's, not some authority's. The only thing that matters is, first, the experience of being in the story, moving through it. Then any interpretation you like. If it's yours, then that's the right one, because what's in a book is not what an author thought he put into it, it's what the reader gets out of it.”

“Your best friend is the person who not only knows all the important stories and events in your life, but has lived through them with you. Your best friend isn't the person you call when you are in jail; mostly likely, she is sitting in the cell beside you.”

“Do not write to impress others. Authors who write to impress people have difficulty remaining true to themselves. A better path is to write what pleases you and pray that there are others like you. Your first and most important reader is you. If you write a book that pleases you, at least you know one person will like it.”

“I know from the bottom of my heart and with all of it, that it doesn't matter if at the end of your life you can say that you shared the best of yourself with the rest of the world and it doesn't matter if everyone in the world remembers you as wonderful; but what matters is if at the end of your life you can say that you shared the best of yourself with the handful of people who are around you, that you gave the wonderful in you, to the people you love and who love you. Happiness never has and never will come from fame.”

“A book is a collaboration between the one who reads and what is read and, at its best, that coming together is a love story like any other.”