"What's that line from TS Eliot? To arrive at the place where you started, but to know it for the first time. I'm able to write about a breakup from a different place. Same brokenness. Same rock-bottom. But a little more informed, now I'm older. Thank God for growing up."

"Getting married and starting a family has been a lifelong goal and one that I have persevered through different paths up to it!"

"I still indulge in a glass of wine or chocolate - treats are mandatory. Without deviating from the day-to-day healthy diet once in a while, it wouldn't be sustainable for me, and that's what I wanted: an approach to eating to last my entire life."

"My three addictions of choice are food, love and work."

"Here's my rule: You always want to pay cash for your own books, because if they look at the name on the credit card and then they look at the name on the book jacket, then there's this look of such profound sympathy for you that you had to resort to this. It really is withering."

"Courage: Great Russian word, fit for the songs of our children's children, pure on their tongues, and free."

"When I am dead, I hope it may be said: His sins were scarlet, but his books were read."

"I'd read a lot of thrillers about politicians and presidents, but never one where you flip the stereotypes and make good people bad and bad people good."