Youth is the period in which a man can be hopeless. The end of every episode is the end of the world. But the power of hoping through everything, the knowledge that the soul survives its adventures, that great inspiration comes to the middle-aged.

A new philosophy generally means in practice the praise of some old vice.

A woman uses her intelligence to find reasons to support her intuition.

An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.

China's one-child policy punishes families for having 'out-of-plan' children, resulting in sex-selective abortion and tens of millions of 'missing girls' as well as forced abortion and sterilization campaigns.

To see what books were available for my older students, I made many trips to the library. If a book looked interesting, I checked it out. I once went home with 30 books! It was then that I realized that kids' novels had the shape of real books, and I began to get ideas for young adult novels and juvenile books.

I go up to San Francisco on holidays and spend time with my family there, but whenever I go to Japan, I enjoy every moment. I try to go back there every year or so. It's a phenomenal place, and I absolutely love it. It's not my second home; it is my home. Whenever I go back, I feel very connected with Japan.

Perhaps you could sympathize with those who seek to replace a dead child with a copy, or to copy a parent or a relative or even a celebrity.