I think the last couple of years of life for many, many people are the same as they were 50, 60, 70 years ago. They could be really tough because of infirmity.

Ideas are like pizza dough, made to be tossed around.

I conveniently forgot to remember that people only have two hands, or, as another parent once said of having a third child, it's time for a zone defense instead of man-to-man.

The problem with freedom is that you just can't go back. Once people see what it means to be free people, you can't go back. So they're going to keep nattering on about this and that, and maybe they'll make another stab at de-funding the fabulous Planned Parenthood or something of the sort. To my mind, it's just not going to work.

A life of unremitting caution, without the carefree - or even, occasionally, the careless - may turn out to be half a life.

I hope readers will do what I do when I read a novel I like: talk in ways that will illuminate their own lives.

Sure smokers have made personal choices. And they pay for those choices every day, whether sitting through an airline flight dyingfor a smoke, or dying for a smoke in the oncology wing of a hospital. The tobacco companies have not paid nearly enough for the killing.