Nobody gets everything in this life. You decide your priorities and you make your choices. I'd decided long ago that any cake I had would be eaten.

Sorry; I have no space left for advice. Just do it.

I have no known marketable skills.

Whenever things sound easy, it turns out there's one part you didn't hear.

Christmas shows us the ties that bind us together, threads of love and caring, woven in the simplest and strongest way within the family.

The other thing that I got back then - the Parker novels have never had much of anything to do with race. There have been a few black characters here and there, but the first batch of books back then, I got a lot of letters from urban black guys in their 20s, 30s, 40s. What were they seeing that they were reacting to? And I think I finally figured it out - at that time, they were guys who felt very excluded from society, that they had been rejected by the greater American world.

Everybody in New York is looking for something. Once in a while, somebody finds it.