I believe that reading widely is the best preparation for writing.

I came from a home where everybody had a book.

I love thinking of movie stars who could play the characters in the books I write.

To me, the most important thing is to tell a good story. If I can do that, I think that enlightenment, respect of nature, etc. follows.

Whether you are a twelve-year-old princess or a twelve-year-old regular kid, you need to know you are loved and respected.

I have always been fascinated by paleontology and prehistoric people, and I've always thought that one of the most intriguing moments in human history was the birth of artistic imagination. I always loved those cave paintings.

I think, first and foremost ,Marie Antoinette was intellectually impoverished. She really had never been introduced to the notion of abstract thinking - of thinking at all in any profound way.

My mother was a great advocate of women's rights, a member of the League of Women's Voters and lifelong member of Planned Parenthood and an advocate of a woman's rights in terms of reproductive issues. She was also a founding member of Common Cause in the state of Indiana.

Never in a million years would I want to live at Versailles with Marie Antoinette or anybody else. I hate to tell you this but I did not even like visiting Versailles. I found it just too ornate. It was like a complete diet of cotton candy, marzipan, and whipped cream.

Thinking - in particular abstract thinking, which most of us are introduced to through the study of mathematics and literature - helps us learn that we can become problem solvers.

When I was growing up I loved reading historical fiction, but too often it was about males; or, if it was about females, they were girls who were going to grow up to be famous like Betsy Ross, Clara Barton, or Harriet Tubman. No one ever wrote about plain, normal, everyday girls.

With my husband, I have twice sailed across the Atlantic in a sailboat one third the length of the Mayflower. I know Atlantic gales inside and out. I endured one that lasted for three days with winds up to fifty knots.

Everyone talks about discovery, but I really believe that great content finds its audience.

I really think the app store is kind of the killer app for Apple and for Google.

I started hearing Snapchat in the same context as Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. That got me curious.

Snapchat's ramp reminded us of another mobile app Benchmark had the good fortune to back at an early stage: Instagram.

The ambitions for Thatgamecompany are very exciting to me.

Companies with aspirations to be larger publishers - Kabam, Kixeye, even Zynga - are moving aggressively off the Facebook platform to mobile and the open Web. Publishers aren't convinced that the costs of being on Facebook are worth it.

Free-to-play isn't a business model. Free-to-play is a marketing strategy. It's a way to get people over the hump of trying out your game. It gets rid of the friction that happens when you charge an upfront fee.

I've watched what happens when a game like 'DragonVale' gets to number one on iOS. Suddenly there's ten other versions of it that hit the store. As a gamer, that bothers me. I don't like those companies.