I like powerful women, and I gravitate to any point in history when a female has significant power. I can spend hours researching any such amazing lady, from Ching Shih to Hatshepsut to Boudica to Zenobia.

I don't want my writing to be work to read. My main goal is completely shameless entertainment. I want people to smile and giggle and enjoy the book. I'm not trying to save the world through literature.

I get really flowery and verbose in my adult books, but I don't think I dumb down my Y.A. It's just cleaner and more snappy. And the adult books have multiple points-of-view. In my Y.A., it's always third person from the main character's perspective.

Most of the names in my books have secondary meaning. Sometimes they foreshadow; sometimes they tell you about the character's origin or back story.

I had no romantic interest in Gable. I considered him an older man.

The folly of mistaking a paradox for a discovery, a metaphor for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths, and oneself for an oracle, is inborn in us.

Survival, in the cool economics of biology, means simply the persistence of one's own genes in the generations to follow.

Like everything which is not the involuntary result of fleeting emotion but the creation of time and will, any marriage, happy or unhappy, is infinitely more interesting than any romance, however passionate.