Quotes from Jodi Picoult

I write about all the horrible things that can happen to kids as a way of keeping those things from happening to mine. Write the books, spit three times over your shoulder and you're safe.

You'd think someone who'd been to medical school would be able to hear through a stethoscope that somebody was empty inside.

I'm not going to tell a person how to think, don't believe in that. What I want to do, when I write these books, is just to say don't be so sure of yourself. Let me pull the carpet out from underneath you, and let's see if you can still find the footing.

Every year I tell myself that I'm not going to read any reviews and then I do. We're all human and when I read something negative it hurts. I think when you write it's part of the game, you're going to get some good reviews and some bad reviews and that's how it goes. I don't write for the reviews.

Some women are meant to change the world while others are meant to hold it together.

I feel I'm able to get rid of any demons lurking in my psyche through my writing, which leaves me free to create all of this and to enjoy our family life, stepping away from all the fictional traumas and the dramas. If I write about family in crisis, then I won't have to live through it, I guess.

Everyone has a book inside of them - but it doesn't do any good until you pry it out.

There's that unwritten schism that literary writers get all the awards and commericals writers get all the success.

Writing is grunt work - you need to have self-motivation, perseverance, and faith... talent is the smallest part of it.

I have several writer friends, but I don't involve them in my work process. I'm more likely to talk about the business of publishing with them.

Gay rights is not something most of us think about - because most of us happen to have been born straight.

Things had a way of working out for the best when you let them run their course.

No one gets to start where they left off; it just doesn't work that way.

It takes two people to make a friendship work

I know that books I have written will still resonate in 50 years - particularly 'My Sister's Keeper.' It has sold three million copies in the States alone. I strongly feel that, as a novelist, you have a platform and the ability to change people's minds.

Instead of plotting the demise of the traditional family, as some politicians and religious leaders would have you believe, gay people mow their lawns and watch 'American Idol' and video their children's concerts and have the same hopes and dreams that their straight counterparts do.

You make yourself strong because it's expected of you. You become confident because someone beside you is unsure. You turn into the person others need you to be.

Love is not an equation, it is not a contract, and it is not a happy ending. Love is the slate under the chalk, the ground that buildings rise, and the oxygen in the air. It is the place you come back to, no matter where your headed

I love you, he whispered, and that was the moment he knew what he was going to do. When you loved someone, you put their needs before your own. No matter how inconceivable those needs were; no matter how fucked up; no matter how much it made you feel like you were ripping yourself into pieces.

true love is felonious… You take someone's breath away… You rob them of the ability to utter a single word… You steal a heart.

A photo says, you were happy, and I wanted to catch that. A photo says, you were so important to me that I put down everything else to come watch.

It's about a girl who is on the cusp of becoming someone.. A girl who may not know what she wants right now, and she may not know who she is right now, but who deserves the chance to find out.

Something still exists as long as there's someone around to remember it.

You can't look back - you just have to put the past behind you, and find something better in your future.