Hallie Ephron

“For me, a good YA novel is the best kind of comfort food.”

“A man notices a woman's figure when she walks in a room. Women have eight million words for blue; a man says dark blue or light blue.”

“Our house was awash in books, and my mother doled out her favorites like they were special treats - which they were.”

“Everyone thinks when they start writing that they can't do it. I was lucky. My sister Delia was the most important person in terms of encouraging me.”

“I was an outsider, never quite part of what was going on, always looking in. It turned out to be great preparation for writing fiction.”

“When something happens far back in the past, people often can't recall exact details. Blame depends upon point of view. There may be a villain, but reality is frustrating because it's often ambiguous.”

“I don't think anybody in my family meant there to be any pressure for me to write. But our parents were incredibly verbal and wrote for a living. The house was full of books, and we all grew up steeped in language. I mean, our mother recited poetry at the dinner table.”

“I'm someone who sits at a computer eight hours a day, and I look in that pinhole camera at the top of my screen and think, 'Someone could be watching me.'”

“Outlining is like putting on training wheels. It gives me the courage to write, but we always go off the outline.”

“I'm sharpest early, and though I can rewrite any time, day or night, I'm useless after noon when it comes to writing first draft.”

“My rule of writing is that no one can do what you can do, so jealousy or competitiveness are pointless. I am always happy when one of my sisters has a book published that I get to read.”

“The book that made a lasting impression was the one my mother gave each of us when she decided we were ready for our first 'adult novel,' Lucy Maud Montgomery's 'The Blue Castle.'”

“When you put your characters in a dire situation, they often do things that surprise even you, so you have to go back and revise your original conception of who they are.”

“I'd long wanted to write about that moment when a woman steps off the career track to have her first child. For me, that was a scary time.”

“Phoebe Wolkind Ephron cracked wise like Dorothy Parker and looked like Katharine Hepburn.”

“Even though I got a late start, first publishing an essay when I was 50 years old, I've since written eight suspense novels.”

“I haven't given any thought to collaborating with my sisters. It would be great fun. My daughter Molly is a wonderful writer - someday I'd love to collaborate with her.”

“As we got older, we grew comfortable in roles that met our parents' expectations. Nora was the smart one. Delia, the comedian. I was the pretty, obedient one. And Amy was the adventurous mischief-maker.”