Even murderers, I suppose, experience the loss of car keys the way the rest of us do. I mean, how can they not? Once you make this person scramble around the house looking for her car keys and finally find them, get in the car, and run into traffic, we can identify with her enough that when she stops the car and pulls the gun out of her purse and heads in to kill somebody, we'll be with her as much as is possible.

I actually think it's sometimes easier for the control freaks to let loose.

I find that I get very excited about what my students are up to and that I get to be the hurdle they need to jump over.

Writers sometimes are paid a great deal of money, but much more frequently they're not paid or are paid only a little bit.

This is true in other fields, too, that a legal aid lawyer gets a whole lot less money than a Hollywood lawyer who handles the estates of celebrities. Maybe the legal aid lawyer is doing something better, though, and maybe they're happier. It's not a completely unheard of idea, but I do think we have to remind ourselves at times to look for satisfaction in other ways.

Somehow we have to detach from feeling as though money is a quick and easy standard by which we can gauge how well we're doing.

We still have so many cultures in which people are imprisoned and whipped and killed for writing what they think.