"I believe that I am very lucky to have close friends who are faithful. From my friends, I have learned the importance of perseverance."

"Art used to be made in the name of faith. We made cathedrals, we made stained-glass windows, we made murals."

"What we really want to do is what we are really meant to do. When we do what we are meant to do, money comes to us, doors open for us, we feel useful, and the work we do feels like play to us."

"I think that 'Floor Sample' is a story of resiliency, a lifelong spiritual search, and a lifelong sense of spiritual companionship that is most often expressed as creativity. My desire in writing the book was to step from behind the icon of 'Julia the teacher' and introduce 'Julia the artist.'"

"All writers write about the past, and I try to make it come alive so you can see what happened."

"A cookbook is not like being an author. It's writing down recipes; it's not writing."

"I was using Twitter a lot on my phone, and was realising there was a massive gap between the link on the tweet and the full story. If you could come up with a summary layer to show in Twitter, that would be awesome."

"'Goon Squad' took about three years to write and that's the short end. My second novel, 'Look at Me,' took six years."