I tell younger writers that indeed it is devastating to be rejected. You feel like the bottom dropped out of your world.

Either you deal with what is the reality, or you can be sure that the reality is going to deal with you.

Nobody can do for little children what grandparents do. Grandparents sort of sprinkle stardust over the lives of little children.

You don't spend twenty years of your life in the service and not have a warm, nostalgic feeling left in you. It's a small service, and there's a lot of esprit de corps.

In my writing, as much as I could, I tried to find the good, and praise it.

I am really quite proud of most of the people I " know who have "made it," who do things to help people.

When you start about family, about lineage and ancestry, you are talking about every person on earth.