"My mother was the influence in my life. She was strong she had great faith in the ultimate triumph of justice and hard work. She believed passionately in education."

"Dream small dreams. If you make them too big, you get overwhelmed and you don't do anything. If you make small goals and accomplish them, it gives you the confidence to go on to higher goals."

"Failure is a word that I simply don't accept."

"To succeed, one must be creative and persistent."

"The violence betwen women is unbelievable. Women try to make each other crawl so that their knees are bleeding."

"Writing is hard work, but a lot of fun, too. It allows me to live out some of my fantasies."

"What is news? It's hard to quantify. Certainly news has changed completely, and the morning shows are not really designed to bring you the news, except to tell you what happened overnight, and the rest of it is a kind of magazine mentality - a little bit of this, a little bit of that. It's harder to be an educated and informed citizen."

"People who avoid the brick walls - all power to ya, but we all have to hit them sometimes in order to push through to the next level, to evolve."