If there is an audience out there for me, I want them to be surprised when the next book comes out.

When I'm writing, I try to have the mask of my character on as I'm walking through the world. When I'm not at my desk, the rest of the time, I try to stay in that character and see the world the way that character would It's almost like method acting in a way -- keeping the character close the way the actor keeps a script close and always tries to be in character.

No one writes a great book every time out, or even a good book.

The two hardest things about writing are starting and not stopping.

The sins of the Midwest: flatness, emptiness, a necessary acceptance of the familiar. Where is the romance in being buried alive? In growing old?

My main question that I ask of my characters is, 'What does it feel like to be you? And how do you get through the day? Where do you find the hope and faith to endure getting through the days, and what are your days like?'

Just contemplating the energy required to make small talk tired him.

I'm sorry you don't like coming back here, her mother often said, to cap whatever petty dust-up they'd had. How could Emily explain: it wasn't her mother or Kersey she'd disowned, but her earlier self, that strange, ungrateful girl who strove to be first at everything and threw tantrums when she failed.

Somewhere in this latest humiliation there was a lesson in self-reliance. He'd failed so completely that he'd become his own man again.

Lately it seems there are mysteries everywhere, as if you've only just opened your eyes.

Worry rolls inside you like a wheel.

It is not brilliance or facility that is necessary, but the determination to bear and even enjoy the dull process of wading into one's own bad prose again, and one more time, and then once again, with the utmost concentration and taste, looking for opportunities to mine deeper.

For most of her life she just expected things would work out, that people would be kind. Now she recognized her good fortune for what it was. She'd been lucky in so much, it had left her woefully unprepared for old age.

You're unsure what you think of him, a fact you pride yourself on. It defines you, this willingness to hear all sides, love everyone. You've stopped believing in evil. Is that a sin? You know what your mother would say, but justice needs to be fair-handed, the dead deserve your compassion. It's your job to understand, to forgive, not simply your custom.

To be lost and forgotten-to be abandoned-is a shared and terrible fear, just as our fondest hope, as we grow older, is that we might leave some parts of us behind in the hearts of those we love and in that way live on.

The spirit of Jane Eyre looms over Once Upon a Day.  Lisa Tucker keeps the plot of this gothic novel bubbling with tons of juicy family secrets.

Like a funeral, a birthday wasn't yours but for the people who loved you.

She had a vision of the two of them trapped on a tiny raft surrounded by miles of open water. It would be a kind of test, like surviving on a desert island -- but that's what a marriage was, wasn't it? They would have to help each other or die.

The city was a puzzle box built of symbols, a confusion of old and new, armored cars and donkeys in the streets, Bedouins and bankers. The Turks and Haredim, the showy Greek and Russian processions -- everyone seemed to be in costume, reenacting the miraculous past.

When I'm writing, I try to have the mask of my character on as I'm walking through the world.