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

You can't always win arguments as a writer, but you have to just go ahead and say, well, I'm doing it that way anyway.

I am sustained by the certainty that life has meaning...as does death.

When we don't allow ourselves to hope, we don't allow ourselves to have purpose. Without purpose, without meaning, life is dark. We've no light within, and we're just living to die.

Like children, dogs want discipline and are most secure when they have rules to live by. The happiest dogs are those with gentle masters who quietly but firmly demand respect.

A short-order cook, just off work, makes easy tracking for lions and worse

He felt ... a suspicion-no, a conviction-than he had been abandoned, forgotten, and that no one in the whole world cared or would ever care enough about him to really find out what he was like and what his dreams were. He was an outcast, a creature somehow vastly different from all other people, an object of scorn and derision, an outsider, secretly loathed and ridiculed by everyone who met him, even by those few who professed to love him.