Sometime during your life—in fact, very soon—you may find yourself reading a book, and you may notice that a book’s first sentence can often tell you what sort of story your book contains.

It is one of life's bitterest truths that bedtime so often arrives just when things are really getting interesting.

Like a church bell, a coffin, and a vat of melted chocolate, a supply closet is rarely a comfortable place to hide.

To stutter through it with you or even stop stuttering and say nothing, was so lucky and soft, better talk than mile-a-minute with anyone. After a few minutes we’d stop rattling, we’d adjust, we’d settle in, and the conversation would speed into the night.

Occasionally there are parents who say, "I brought my child so he or she could learn what the career of a writer is like, and you did this long theatrical performance instead, and I'm very disappointed."

They looked at each other like a pair of parentheses.

This is love, to sit with someone you've known forever in a place you've been meaning to go, and watching as their life happens to them until you stand up and it's time to go.