My wife is my first audience. She's a tough lady, so I can't say that I ever scare her. Except, of course, when she sees me the way I look before breakfast.

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.

Tommy told Sal about the strange white-cloth figure with black stitches that he had found on the front porch. "Sounds like Pillsbury Doughboy gone punk," Sal said.

The selfless love that we give to others, to the point of being willing to sacrifice our lives for them, is all the proof I need that human beings are not mere animals of self-interest. We carry within us a divine spark, and if we chose to recognize it, our lives have dignity, meaning, hope.

Books had shown me, however, that all people everywhere wanted their lives to have purpose and meaning. This longing was universal.

Books are packaged dreams.

I fall down on the side of free will, simply because if you look at where I came from, and what I was able to do in my life, what was able to happen.