There's sometimes a weird benefit to having an alcoholic, violent father. He really motivated me in that I never wanted to be anything like him.

I always thought happiness was a choice and I always chose things that made me happy, and books were one of those.

Books are packaged dreams.

Some argued that the youth of today were poorly educated and insufficiently industrious, but one of them had sought to validate his generation by spending considerable time and effort chiseling an obscene word in the concrete picnic table, and he had spelled it correctly.

Death came, Death went, but Commerce flowed Eternal.

We never had books in the house. Not any book in our house. Not a Bible, not anything. So, I would go the library from a very young age and get the books out.

Strangely enough, for many many years I didn't talk about my childhood and then when I did I got a ton of mail - literally within a year I got a couple of thousand letters from people who'd had a worse childhood, a similar childhood, a less-bad childhood, and the question that was most often posed to me in those letters was: how did you get past the trauma of being raised by a violent alcoholic?