Sometimes good choices are really bad ones, wrapped up in so much fear you can't even see straight.
— Deb Caletti
In a lifetime, the recipe always needs amending - more of this, a little less of that, what to do now that the cake has fallen.
I wrote one book, signed with a good agent, and sat back and waited for the phone to ring. I was sure that the great news would come at any moment. Four books later, I finally got that call.
Writers are troubled about finding time to write and writer's block and publicizing books that aren't books yet. They agonize over how to write and what to write and what not to write.
'The Nature of Jade' is about a girl who works with the elephants at the zoo near her home, and who, through her involvement with them, becomes involved with a boy and his baby.
I was a book lover from the beginning. I loved, love, words and images and ideas, the ways a book can make you feel things deeply or help you understand something you never even knew there were words for.
One of the most constant and sustaining truths of my life has been this: I love the library.
I think a setting is hugely important. I look at setting as a character with its own look, sound, history, quirks, goofy temperaments and moods.
All of us create our own versions of an event, of our lives, even, not because we're liars, necessarily, but because we can only see and understand the truth from our own viewpoint, and a shifting viewpoint at that.
Like all kids with divorced parents, I have an abundance of holidays.
It's human nature to want to help and soothe and save with your love, but it's also arrogant.
When you go looking for rescue, you end up trapped in your own weakness.
My dream was, and always had been, to write a book. To be a writer.
To be a writer is to connect and to play and to attempt to see clearly and understand. It astounds me regularly that feeling things deeply and writing them down is basically my job description.
Bliss is the ocean, a towel on the sand, the sun out, the chance to swim in waves or walk dragging a stick behind you, a good book, a cold drink.
My most memorable teacher was Rich Campe, my third-grade teacher at Fairlands Elementary in Pleasanton, California.
Becoming a YA author was actually a very lucky accident. When I wrote the 'Queen of Everything,' I thought it was a book for adults.
All of my books come from something that I happen to be working out at a given point in my life. It's kind of self-therapy.
You never know how - or when - the idea for a book will appear.
I've never met a popcorn ball I didn't like.
Often, marriage was solitude, with company.
When your arms are out wide, you'll capture love and joy and golden moments but other things, too. Mistrust will sneak in on a wave of that joy, and complications will ride the backs of the golden moments, and there will be both love and the risks of love. That's the way it is. That's the design.
When I was a young mother at home with a two year old and a five year old, living on the Eastside in one of those neighborhoods where all the houses look the same, where all the cars look the same and the lawns look the same, I was writing in secret.
I became a writer because I love books, and I believe in their power.
I long for books; I am utterly greedy about them.
I understood right from the start that every set of library doors were the sort of magic portals that lead to other lands. My God, right within reach there were dinosaurs and planets and presidents and girl detectives!
If you think about becoming a writer, that's just really one of the big dreams I had. It's really important to have those dreams and pursue your passions.
I always say that, for me, writing a book is like a wacky Greyhound bus trip - I know where I'm starting and where I'll end up, but I have no idea what will happen along the way.
I would eat fruitcake if there'd been a nuclear war and I'd run out of canned goods.
Although I love snow, it messes things up terribly around Seattle, with all of our hills. I worry about my loved ones driving.
