Novelist

A title means marketing. It means that company's coming soon, and you'd better get out the Christmas lights so they don't miss your house.

I love rewriting because that is where and how you discover the story. It's like you have this skeleton, and you get to put flesh on it and hair and clothes and really wonderful jewelry.

I love real books, paper books, but I also love buying online, and I think that people are more willing to take a chance to read something if it's cheaper - sometimes books on the Kindle are $6. A hardback book is $25. For $25, it better be a really great book. Or you're going to be mad.

A product name has to be specific. You know that Tasty Soup is tasty - that Hot Chips will burn off the roof of your mouth.

I had a nervous breakdown at 17 when my first love left me, and he was a typical bad boy, albeit a charismatic one, with a string of broken hearts trailing behind him.

People love stories. They need stories.

Literature can allow us to experience the best side of humankind, where instead of giving up, we struggle desperately in the ruins for love, connection and hope.

I'm a big believer in quantum physics, which says that the universe is more incredible and mysterious than any of us can imagine, which is my way of saying, 'Anything is possible, including angels.'

A lot of people hurl themselves into relationships to lose themselves, but I think the best relationships help us to be more ourselves, to bring forth our best selves.

L.A. is a place people come to for all sorts of reasons, often to reinvent themselves, and that fascinates me.

I am an indifferent cook, but I can make pie.

Is there nothing the prodigiously talented Ann Patchett can't do? She's channeled the world of opera, Boston politics, magic, unwed motherhood, and race relations, creating scenarios so indelible, you swear they are right outside your door.

I think I became a writer because of my love of stories and an inability to stop asking, 'What if?'

When self-publishing started, it was mostly people who really couldn't write. And they just wanted to get their book out, and they couldn't get traditional deals.

I absolutely want and prize and love and revere every single media review I get, but if I got 50 reviews from major newspapers and one review from Amazon, I still would feel a little weird: 'What's going on? Why aren't people responding?'

I always write about the things that haunt me, the questions I have.

I was a bookworm who aced every test - until third grade, when my teacher handed out a pop quiz about Jesus and the Apostles.

If a kid disappears, now there's Amber Alerts: they know this-this-this. In the '50s, we kids wandered around. Nobody knew what you were doing.

All writers know how important a good title is. It's the first thing readers see, along with a knock-your-socks-off cover - a seductive 'come hither' for the story within.

I had a writing professor at Brandeis who told me I'd never make it - and when I sold my first novel a few years later, I sent him a copy!