And though some days it is very hard, I try not to live for the future. And I try not to dream of the past.

My wife and I would be very comfortable having a baby at home, or using one of the terrific nurse-midwives at the hospital.

But it's funny how the memory works and how sometimes we just belive whatever we want.

A single, ordinary person still can make a difference - and single, ordinary people are doing precisely that every day.

As Jeremy Bentham had asked about animals well over two hundred years ago, the question was not whether they could reason or talk, but could they suffer? And yet, somehow, it seemed to take more imagination for humans to identify with animal suffering than it did to conceive of space flight or cloning or nuclear fusion. Yes, she was a fanatic in the eyes of most of the country. . .Mostly, however, she just lacked patience for people who wouldn't accept her belief that humans inflicted needless agony on the animals around them, and they did so in numbers that were absolutely staggering.

As a novelist, there are three phone calls you never expect to receive in your lifetime because if you waited for them you would grow despairing - one calling from Stockholm with a Swedish accent, one from the NBA, and one from Oprah Winfrey.

Lie. Put down on paper the most interesting lies you can imagine. . .and then make them plausible.