The truth was I felt ugly growing up. I only really started feeling comfortable in myself when I was 40.

I suffer from low self-esteem. I had horrible self-esteem growing up. You really have to save yourself because the critic within you will eat you up. It's not the outside world - it's your interior life, that critic within you, that you have to silence.

Intelligence is sexy. Don't play dumb, especially young girls. Don't play dumb. And let people see that you are intelligent.

On a Friday night in 1983, I was in a taxi in New York riding home from dinner with friends. A drunk driver ran a red light and hit the cab, and I was thrown toward the glass partition. I tried to duck, but my face hit the glass, and the impact fractured my cheekbone, my eye socket, my collarbone and several ribs.

With my adult books, for the first six weeks or so, it's about 60 percent ebooks in terms of sales. The kids' books, it's like 5 percent. Which means that the parents, the ones that aren't going into stores now, they're no longer buying books for their kids, which is not great.

The house where I grew up in the Hancock Park section of Los Angeles was like a dream - even though my family faced threats after my father bought it in August 1948.

I love when I go out and I have my hair and makeup done, but I also like it when I'm just with the family because that's real.

I never got to play as a child. All my spare time was spent working on my family's smallholding.