Sometimes we don't see out of our peripheral vision what's coming right around the corner.

If an opportunity scares you, that's God's way of saying you should jump at it.

Down time is where we become ourselves... a hiatus that passes for boredom but is really the quiet moving of the wheels inside that fuel creativity.

Whether talking about addiction, taxation [on cigarettes] or education [about smoking], there is always at the center of the conversation an essential conundrum: How come we're selling this deadly stuff anyway?

I think what saved me, as a writer, is that there are really two breaking points in my life. One was when I was 19 and my mother died, and one was when I was 31 and my first child was born. And that sort of gave me a kind of rebirth that I think has been invaluable to me as a novelist, in terms of seeing the world anew.

When men do the dishes, it's called helping. When women do the dishes, it is called life.

You realize that these accidental decisions you make about changing jobs, about moving into an apartment where you make new friends and confidants, about going to one city over another, that sometimes they're completely arbitrary decisions that you haven't put as much thought into as perhaps you should have, and yet they change the course of your whole life.