"I don't like to think of it as 'stolen'. They have no proof that I didn't plan on giving it back.'You're kidding, right?'He shrugged. 'You have no proof either.'She squinted back at him. 'Were you planning on giving it back?'Maybe.'An orange light blinked on in the corner of Cinder's vision-her cyborg programming picking up on the lie."

"I know what the world is like. Nobody does anything unless there's something in it for themselves. But there are some people who do more than they have to for what they get in return, and those people are kind right to the heart."

"Should you care to write (and only the saints know why you should) you must needs have knowledge and art and magic - the knowledge of the music of words, the art of being artless, and the magic of loving your readers."

"What's changed is we now have good anatomical, geological, archaeological evidence that Neanderthals are not our ancestors. When I wrote 'Lucy,' I considered Neanderthals ancestors of modern humans. We have gone back twice the age of Lucy, six million years. And we see that upright bipedal walking goes back that far in time."

"There's always failure. And there's always disappointment. And there's always loss. But the secret is learning from the loss, and realizing that none of those holes are vacuums."