I took a gap year myself after high school and worked on a farm near Lyon, France. I stayed with the Vallet family, picked and packed fruit, and discovered that red wine can be a breakfast drink. That led to further travel as a university student.

When I got married, I decided to take a break. I wanted to travel, see life differently and discover things about myself.

I modeled for a little while in college. I was desperate to travel, and I got scouted, and they wanted me to go to Paris and London for six months. And I discovered that I hated it. I didn't like the expectation to be pretty all the time.

I travel the world visiting global health programs as an ambassador for the global health organization, PSI, and sometimes the disconnect I see is truly striking: people can get cold Coca Cola, but far too infrequently malaria drugs; most own mobile phones, but don't have equal access to pre-natal care.

To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.

Time discovers truth.

Last time I was in London, I visited Number 5, Bruton Street, which is the address I gave to Violet Bridgerton, the matriarch of the Bridgerton clan in my novels. It was a bit disconcerting to learn that it's actually a pub.

One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.

All the adversity and discouragement is trying to cloud your mind. But I learned to deal with it. In the end, I'm happy and thankful and blessed.

It's good to have a free space to laugh and cry and get angry about gender and sexuality. That's one of the things I am the most thankful for from my friends and my family. They've given me the place to freely have gender be a part of our discourse.

All our discontents about what we want appeared to spring from the want of thankfulness for what we have.

The unthankful heart... discovers no mercies; but let the thankful heart sweep through the day and, as the magnet finds the iron, so it will find, in every hour, some heavenly blessings!

Thematically, most of my work deals with transition, our culture's constant acceleration, and emotional connection and disconnection through technology.

But the first the general public learned about the discovery was the news of the destruction of Hiroshima by the atom bomb. A splendid achievement of science and technology had turned malign. Science became identified with death and destruction.

We are living in dystopia, in a world that is dominated by technology and disconnect, alienation, loneliness, and dysfunction.

Turn off your email; turn off your phone; disconnect from the Internet; figure out a way to set limits so you can concentrate when you need to, and disengage when you need to. Technology is a good servant but a bad master.

I was a very bad accountant; I didn't care about money, golf or discovering fraud. After about a year I was sacked; then I went into teacher training.

I took Spanish in high school and I didn't do too well in it. My Spanish teacher told me not to go on with Spanish anymore, so I was discouraged a little bit.

I had a teacher in art school who said something about the only works he really enjoyed seeing or found much in were works where he had a sense that a discovery was made in the course of making this object. I like to hold to that as my marching orders.

I went whole hog at the actor's lifestyle - really embraced it. I had by then known how much I loved acting already, because I discovered acting from a teacher in the seminary - that's the first place I ever did it, in the seminary.

Ballet found me, I guess you could say. I was discovered by a teacher in middle school. I always danced my whole life. I never had any training, never was exposed to seeing dance, but I always had something inside of me. I would love to choreograph and dance around.

When you ask someone a question, you trigger an unconscious flashback of their having been put on the spot earlier in life by a teacher, parent, or coach, and you create a syntactical 'you versus me' disconnect.

I discovered Deborah Ellis's books in the school library after my head teacher encouraged me to go beyond the school curriculum and look for books I might enjoy.