My favorite book of all time is Cold Comfort Farm, by Stella Gibbons.

No matter how nice the company one might be with, however, it is never pleasant to have a rifle pointed at one's back.

Write the kind of story you would like to read. People will give you all sorts of advice about writing, but if you are not writing something you like, no one else will like it either.

There's nothing secret about it. Everyone knows that I am waiting for my real parents, the king and queen, to come restore me to my rightful throne.

I was too lazy to start a whole new story, so I just stuck a princess into the story I was working on... and The Princess Diaries was born!

My original inspiration was my mom: a few years after the death of my dad, she started dating one my teachers!

Save your rejections so that later when you are famous you can show them to people and laugh.

My favorite book of all time is Cold Comfort Farm, by Stella Gibbons.

All of my characters are a little bit based on people I know in real life. You know when you do that you have to change the character a little bit in case your friend or your relative reads the book, because you don't want them to know you wrote about them... They might get mad.

For each book, I do end up making a kind of playlist to fit the characters.

Growing up, I mostly read comic books and sci-fi. Then I discovered the book 'Jane Eyre' by Jane Austen. It introduced me to the world of romance, which I have since never left. Also, the world of the first-person narrative.

I actually love writing for teens best. I had such an awful time in my own teen years - I love having the chance to relive them through my fiction.

I like to think of my books and the movies of my books living in two separate universes. Each is very nice, but only one is correct - the book. But that doesn't mean you can't enjoy the other versions, and I always do.

I think if I hadn't been a writer, I'd have been a teacher like my dad. He was a college professor, and one of my greatest regrets is that he passed away before I was able to prove to him that I wasn't going to be stuck working at Rax Roast Beef for the rest of my life!

I think you get so wrapped up in the book you're currently writing, it's hard to think about anything else. But I know as soon as I'm done with this book, I'll move on to something else.

I was an unhappy child, and that puts me off having a child of my own.

I was the kind of kid who couldn't really stop making up stories during class. I didn't do very well academically because I was always drawing these little doodles in the margins of my notebooks and I wasn't bringing home the best grades.

If you're writing a screenplay, you need to be prepared to let go: there's a good chance the words you write aren't going to be the ones that end up on screen.

My family, they're story tellers. My mom is Irish, and my dad is Italian. In my family, we weren't allowed to watch TV while we ate - we had to sit around the table and tell stories about our day.

One of the biggest motivations for me with writing my books is to offer girls some escapism, especially girls who really need it, like I did.

Pretty isn't the only thing that matters - being smart and kind matters more, of course - but all daughters should hear from their moms that they look pretty once in a while.

Screenwriting is a much more collaborative effort. When you write a novel, it's just you, with input from your editor.

This is how many people become artists, musicians, writers, computer programmers, record-holding athletes, scientists... by spending time alone practicing what they love.

When I did see the story of Persephone, I was really drawn to it. Persephone, the goddess of spring, was kept from Olympus by her mother, Demeter, because Demeter was very worried that the gods of Olympus would do something terrible to her.

When I was a kid, I had a couple of really good friends, like some really good best friends, but I was really shy other than that.

When you feel like an outsider - for whatever reason - you spend a lot of time alone.

Writing used to be my hobby, but now that it's my job, I have no hobby - except watching TV and laying around the pool reading 'U.S. Weekly.' I have tried many hobbies, such as knitting, Pilates, ballet, yoga, and guitar, but none of them have taken.

Anything can happen in the blink of an eye. Anything at all. One. Two. Three. Blink.

Diet Coke does not contain nasty chemicals. It contains lovely and delicious carbonation caffeine and aspartame. Whats unnatural about that

Wait. Why am I thinking about Krispy Kremes Were supposed to be exercising.

Maybe nobody has a right to tell anybody to shut up. Maybe this is how wars get started, because someone tells someone else to shut up, and then no one will apologize.

I have known more men destroyed by the desire to have wife and child and to keep them in comfort than I have seen destroyed by drink and harlots.

But, I think that the reason I responded to this book, sort of paradoxically, is that it starts out like The Big Chill, sort of. Four friends, who are not quite happy with their life, and every year they get together for a week and look for some comfort from each other.

But I think one of the reasons I tend to stay in the water most of the time is I distrust the comfort.

The whole story of the comfort women, the system of forced sexual slavery, the medical experiments of Unit 731, is not something that is in the US psyche. That is changing because many books are coming out.

Shows can come and go. They can be a hit and then in three years, gone. There's some comfort in having the stability of a job and having children. It's a double-edged sword.

If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom, and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that too.

The bourgeois prefers comfort to pleasure, convenience to liberty, and a pleasant temperature to the deathly inner consuming fire.

The house has to serve comfort. The work of art is revolutionary; the house is conservative.

The great danger for family life, in the midst of any society whose idols are pleasure, comfort and independence, lies in the fact that people close their hearts and become selfish.

Look whether it be indifferently, as well for sins secret as open, what you find to be your best cordials to comfort you, whether God's Word, or natural means.

Scientists at MIT and engineering schools all across America say that they could improve the fuel economy standards for the existing set of vehicles by 10 miles per gallon using existing technology, without compromising safety or comfort at all.

Today the tyrant rules not by club or fist, but disguised as a market researcher, he shepherds his flocks in the ways of utility and comfort.

Oh the comfort, the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person, having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but pouring them all right out, just as they are.

If you look closely enough, amid the merciless and the bitter, there is always the chance that you may find comfort and the promise of something good.

Man loves everything that satisfies his comfort. He hates everything that wants to draw him out of his acquired and secured position and that disturbs him. Thus he loves the house and hates art.

We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all that we need to make us really happy is something to be enthusiastic about.

To the degree we're not living our dreams, our comfort zone has more control of us than we have over ourselves.

So people have been hurting and I understand that. And it doesn't give them comfort or solace for me to tell them, you know, but for me, we would be in a worldwide depression.