Caroline B. Cooney

I love writing and do not know why it is considered such a difficult, agonizing profession.

People nearly always believe, and are willing to back it up with weapons and cruelty, that their religion and way of life is better than the other person's.

If you write a story based on a real person, you're trapped by the details of the real person and his life. It gets in the way of writing your own story.

In early 1993, when I was 12, I was separated from my family as the Sierra Leone civil war, which began two years earlier, came into my life.

Another thing that freaks me out is time. Time is like a book. You have a beginning, a middle and an end. It's just a cycle.

My first career ambitions involved turning into a boy; I intended to be either a railway guard or a knight errant.