I tried to write with someone else once before, but it was not successful.

I want to keep meeting new people, enlarging my circle of friends. I have great friends now... really good people. But I'm always ready for what comes next.

My father was a very unhappy person, very sarcastic, and my mother was very nervous and worried about what people thought. They weren't monsters, but it wasn't a good childhood.

In my next life, I want to be tall and thin, parallel park and make good coffee. But for now, I have lots of stuff to work out in my life, but I'll have that until the day I die. I want to write more books.

At age 12, I was put on tranquilizers when I should have gotten help. There was nothing major and awful, I just didn't feel my family was supportive and emotionally generous.

Sometimes it's easier to show than it is to tell.

Normally, I name my characters after famous comedians.

I made the choice long ago to write about real life. And life is both serious and funny.

When my father would yell at me, I told myself someday I'd use it in a book.

I try to be careful because technology changes so much over the years. But some things don't change. Kids and parents have disagreements, kids try to manipulate, parents try to sit down with rules and regs. That part never changes.

I deal with unhappy marriages a lot. I've never been married, I'm single.

I'm very lucky. I'm very fortunate that my books have never gone out of print - none of them.

I tried to write with someone else once before, but it was not successful.

None of my characters seem to have had sex yet - I haven't written about that. And I wouldn't want to deal with what's happening in Oregon - the school shootings.

I didn't expect to be doing a whole bunch of Amber Browns. And because it was just one book, and the father had moved away, I didn't realize I was going to have to deal more with shared custody, divorce and all those issues.

I wish I had had my books when I was a kid, I do.

The books are funny and sad, and that's what people respond to.

I think my books talk about kids learning to like and respect themselves and each other. You can't write a message book; you just tell the best story you know how to tell.

I must stress here the point that I appreciate clarity, order, meaning, structure, rationality: they are necessary to whatever provisional stability we have, and they can be the agents of gradual and successful change.

The successful establishment of a buffer zone around Fort Carson will provide an example for other bases around the country as we seek to protect the training mission of the U.S. military while preserving critical habitats on our ranges.

I'll tell you what I did need to learn was tolerance, and I think I've been actually given a daily opportunity to practice that, and it's - it's - and I know that that sounds almost like a backhanded slap, and it is in a way because I haven't been successful at it every day.

I am always successful in my work.

A good title is the title of a successful book.

When I meet successful people I ask 100 questions as to what they attribute their success to. It is usually the same: persistence, hard work and hiring good people.

I don't know if there is any one secret to successful writing, but one important step is to move beyond imitation and discover what you can write that no one else can - that is, find out who you are and write that in an appropriate narrative and style.

Belief in oneself is one of the most important bricks in building any successful venture.

To judge between good or bad, between successful and unsuccessful would take the eye of a God.

If those committed to the quest fail, they will be forgiven. When lost, they will find another way. The moral imperative of humanism is the endeavor alone, whether successful or not, provided the effort is honorable and failure memorable.

The successful man will profit from his mistakes and try again in a different way.

I don't think there has been any increase in sophistication in the audience. When people are aware of a concept that's easy to understand, and there's an actor who will attract them to the theater and it's a movie that's funny three-quarters of the time, it will be successful.

The magic formula that successful businesses have discovered is to treat customers like guests and employees like people.

Every successful revolution puts on in time the robes of the tyrant it has deposed.

And in Iraq we tried to implement the same policy that was so successful in Saudi Arabia, but Saddam Hussein didn't buy. When the economic hit men fail in this scenario, the next step is what we call the jackals.

The secret of the truly successful, I believe, is that they learned very early in life how not to be busy. They saw through that adage, repeated to me so often in childhood, that anything worth doing is worth doing well.

I find that the very things that I get criticized for, which is usually being different and just doing my own thing and just being original, is the very thing that's making me successful.

I think that somebody with the resources and innovation and the idea is going to come out of nowhere and come up with a successful space travel program.

Behind every successful man is a woman, behind her is his wife.

Schools are successful only insofar as they reduce the dependence of a child's opportunities upon his social origins.

I think that I've still not been successful at playing the role of the retired actor, and I'd like to work on that.

There is no person in this room whose basic rights are not involved in any successful defiance to the carrying out of court orders.

My favorite characters are the ones that are the most successful movies.

He or she must be successful in economic terms, but always within an ethical framework. Whether his or her constituency is a corporation and its shareholders or the customers in a small and privately held business, his or her first responsibility is to serve that constituency.

There are people who make things happen, there are people who watch things happen, and there are people who wonder what happened. To be successful, you need to be a person who makes things happen.

There are a lot of people who think that's what's needed to be successful is always being right, always being careful, always picking the right path.

For our welfare reform efforts to be successful, we must empower local charitable organizations with the resources to address their local community needs.

The number one secret of being a successful writer is this: marry an English major.

When we hide our failings from others, we seek to hide them from ourselves, and it is in the latter attempt that we are most successful.

It's not a very secure industry. I've spoken to a couple of people recently who had a successful TV show and then found themselves absolutely skint and struggling to find a job.

I was putting myself under enormous pressure to be successful.