With blue vinyl-tile floor, pale-green wainscoating, pink walls, a yellow ceiling, and orange-and-white stork-patterned drapes, the expectant fathers' lounge churned with the negative energy of color overload. It would have served well as the nervous-making set for a nightmare about a children's-show host who led a secret life as an ax murderer. The chain-smoking clown didn't improve the ambience.

If dogs talked, one of them would be president by now. Everybody likes dogs.

Your mind always does worse things than people can show in a movie.

I never have lunch because it makes me foggy-headed.

Once you have had a wonderful dog, a life without one, is a life diminished.

The world is a very complex and interesting place and that is what I really want my fiction to say: wake up to how amazing the world is.

Always, the eye sees more than the mind can comprehend, and we go through life self-blinded to much that lies before us. We want a simple world, but we live in a magnificently complex one, and rather than open ourselves to it, we perceive the world through filters that make it less daunting.