Mrs. Bonneville never buckled her seat belt, even though it was required by state law; an ardent libertarian, she opposed government meddling in all matters of personal choice.

When I'm working on a novel of my own, I try to read mostly nonfiction, although sometimes I break down and peek at something else.

Actually it was the mark of the stupid, which is what you get for sitting under a tree during a thunderstorm.

Here's my rule: You always want to pay cash for your own books, because if they look at the name on the credit card and then they look at the name on the book jacket, then there's this look of such profound sympathy for you that you had to resort to this. It really is withering.

One problem with age is that patience begins to ebb.

Good satire comes from anger. It comes from a sense of injustice, that there are wrongs in the world that need to be fixed. And what better place to get that well of venom and outrage boiling than a newsroom, because you're on the front lines.

That's what people do when they find a special place that wild and full of life, they trample it to death.