Evil is no faceless stranger, living in a distant neighborhood. Evil has a wholesome, hometown face, with merry eyes and an open smile. Evil walks among us, wearing a mask which looks like all our faces.

Like all of us in this storm between birth and death, I can wreak no great changes on the world, only small changes for the better, I hope, in the lives of those I love.

This may be the primary purpose of dogs: to restore our sense of wonder and to help us maintain it, to make us consider that we should trust our intuition as they trust theirs and to help us realize that a thing known intuitively can be as real as anything known by material experience.

A long walk and grooming with a well-mannered dog is a Zen experience that leaves you refreshed and in a creative frame of mind.

I can remember the times when I started including humor in novels that were suspenseful. I was told you can't do that because you can't keep the audience in suspense if they're laughing. My attitude was, if the character has a sense of humor, then that makes the character more real because that's how we deal with the vicissitudes of life, we deal with it through humor.

The things we worry about the most are never the things that bite us. The sharpest teeth always take their nip of us when we are looking the other way.

He once told me that an August evening was "as hot as three toads in a Cuisinart," a comparison that left me blinking two days later.