Walking on thin ice, I'm paying the price. I'm throwing the dice in the air. Why must we learn it the hard way, and play the game of life with your heart?

Remember love. Remember our hearts are one. Even when we are fighting with each other, our hearts are beating in unison. I love you.

Losing my daughter was a very serious pain. There was always some empty space in my heart.

Even my mother told me: 'You are a handsome woman, but you're not pretty. Pretty girls don't have those big bones.'

When I was 4 years old my mother put me into an early music education school. That's where they taught you perfect pitch and harmony and how to write music and all that. At that time, one of the homeworks was to listen to all the sounds and the noise of a day and transfer that into musical notes.

Mothers are not supposed to give guidance.

When I was four years old, my mother put me into a school for early music education where you get perfect pitch and harmony and composition.

Sometimes the father feels pushed out because of the connection between the mother and the child.

Tape the sound of the moon fading at dawn. Give it to your mother to listen to when she's in sorrow.

I often wish my mother had died so that at least I could get some people's sympathy. But there she was, a perfectly beautiful mother.

In the '60s we fought for peace, when the Vietnam war was on. We were against the cops and against the politicians, and there was a lot of waving banners and all that. And I think in a way, just as they were enjoying that machoism of war, we were enjoying the machismo of being anti-war, you know?

When you go to war, both sides lose totally.

In the Second World War, I was a little girl. I was evacuated in my country.

If people want to make war they should make a color war, and paint each others’ cities up in the night in pinks and greens.

Some people are saying there's going to be a third World War. I hope not. I really think this is a time that people can start to mend things by negotiations, dealings. We know about dealings, don't we? We have brilliant lawyers. Why don't we have brilliant lawyers standing up and working for peace?

The war industry people are very together; they know exactly what they want; they don't even have to talk to each other. The peace industry people are just intellectuals who are very critical of each other... Unless the peace industry is powerful, we're always going to have war. It is as simple as that.

People are still thinking of solving problems by violence and war, and that has to stop.

Your thoughts create reality. The most pragmatic way to create world peace is to use your power of visualization. Think Peace, Act Peace, Spread Peace, Imagine Peace. Your thoughts will soon cover the planet. The most important thing is to believe in your power. It works.

I don't believe in a chronological way of doing things.

I believe in people so much that if the whole of civilization is burned so we don't have any memory of it, even then people will start to build their own art. It is a necessity -- a function. We don't need history.

I don't really believe in going with somebody to have tea and chat. I don't do that. It's just a waste of time.

Everybody's an artist. Everybody's God. It's just that they're inhibited. I believe in people so much that if the whole of civilization is burned so we don't have any memory of it, even then people will start to build their own art. It is a necessity -- a function. We don't need history.

It's always good to do something that is not a repeat. I just don't believe in repeating.

When I think about writers who use fiction as social commentary and to raise social awareness but who are also very popular, I think of Dickens.

Gay rights is not something most of us think about - because most of us happen to have been born straight.

I think many of my books, including 'Handle with Care,' including 'My Sister's Keeper,' circle back to how far are we willing to go for the people we love? I think love changes the way we think. It's the thing that takes you out of what your normal set of beliefs would be.

I think I have sort of gravitated toward issues that I don't know the answers to, because that's what's more interesting for me to write.

Writing is total grunt work. A lot of people think it's all about sitting and waiting for the muse. I don't buy that. It's a job. There are days when I really want to write, days when I don't. Every day I sit down and write.

Every year I tell myself that I'm not going to read any reviews and then I do. We're all human and when I read something negative it hurts. I think when you write it's part of the game, you're going to get some good reviews and some bad reviews and that's how it goes. I don't write for the reviews.

I am an activist. I have a really big pulpit with my fiction and I love knowing that I can make people think.

I think the 'New York Times' reviews overall tend to overlook popular fiction, whether you're a man, woman, white, black, purple or pink. I think there are a lot of readers who would like to see reviews that belong in the range of commercial fiction.

The act of writing... is the act of trying to understand why my opinion is what it is. And ultimately, I think that's the same experience the reader has when they pick up one of my books.

I think there are readers out there and I don't think the book is dead. And more importantly I don't think readers have to choose between literary and commercial fiction.

I don't want to tell people what to think. I'm the least qualified person in the world for that. If I'd go around pretending to be the expert on everything, I'd become Dan Brown, and I don't understand that. We all do our research if we're good writers, and we all work hard to get it right, but that doesn't mean we're experts in the field. The best we can do is challenge people to learn the facts themselves.

Fiction allows for moral questioning, but through the back door. Personally, I like books that make you think - books you're still wondering about three days after you finish them; books you hand to a friend and say "Read this, so we can talk about it."

Gay rights to me that is the last civil right that we have not granted in America and I think it's an enormous embarrassment.

If you don't believe in yourself, and you don't have the fortitude to make that dream happen, why should the hotshots in the publishing world take a chance on you? I don't believe that you need an MFA to be a writer, but I do think you need to take some good workshops.

There are certain things that I'll hear about and that I think will make a great book and I put it in a file. Sometimes it's a situation that interests me, and I don't even realize what I'm trying to say about it until I get closer to it. Sometimes the book after that I've written 125 pages of, and I can tell you what the book is after that. I just sort of have a linear progression, but more than anything, the topics land in your lap. I don't feel that I go out searching for them.

She's not like anyone I've ever seen before. When I'm not with her, I want to be. And when she opens the book and I see her face, I can barely remember what I'm supposed to say, much less how to speak at all." I test the words on my tongue. "I think I might be in love with her. But how can I really know, since the only love I've ever experienced was written for me?

I think there are crossroads in our lives when we make grand, sweeping decisions without even realizing it.

You can't be real," Delilah murmurs. "Says who?" I ask. "Did you really think that a story exists only when you're reading it?

I could think whatever I wanted to, but realized that any promises I made myself were destined to be broken.

Is it because they are so comfortable, they already know what the other is thinking? Or is it because after a certain point, there is simply nothing left to say?

And I think, not for the first time, that what is immoral is not always wrong.

think about it: Romeo and Juliet bucked the system, and look where it got them. Superman has the hots for Lois Lane, when the better match, of course, would be with Wonder Woman.

I think you're the only person who gets me. When I'm with you, the world doesn't feel like a problem I can't figure out. Please come to the dance, because you're my music.

When you are a kid you have your own language, and unlike French or Spanish or whatever you start learning in fourth grade, this one you are born with, and eventually lose...Kids think with their brains cracked wide open; becoming an adult...is only a slow sewing it shut.

Maybe I was naïve to think that silence was implicit complacence, instead of a festering question. Maybe I was silly to believe that friends owed each other anything.

You give her all your french fries, even when she won't give you back onion rings,' Sophie says. 'And when you say her name it sounds different.' How?' Sophie thinks. 'Like it's covered with blankets.

Chicken,' Josie said. 'Have you ever been in love?' Peter looked at Josie, and thought of how they had once tied a note with their addresses to a helium balloon and let it go in her backyard, certain it would reach Mars. Instead, they had received a letter from a widow who lived two blocks away. 'Yeah,' he said. 'I think so.