When your mother asks, 'Do you want a piece of advice?' it is a mere formality. It doesn't matter if you answer yes or no. You're going to get it anyway.

Success is outliving your failures

Sex in the nineties is boring. The problem is that it has gone from an active act to a spectator sport. We watch people make love on television and in films. We call 900 numbers to hear what someone would do to us if they weren't sitting in a boiler room of other dirty talkers reading from a prepared script.

I didn't fight my way to the top of the food chain to be a vegetarian.

The family. We are a strange little band of characters trudging through life sharing diseases and toothpaste, coveting one another's desserts, hiding shampoo, borrowing money, locking each other out of our rooms. . . and trying to figure out the common thread that bound us all together.

Throughout the years I have set up my own rules about eating food: Never eat anything you can't pronounce. Beware of food that is described as, "Some Americans say it tastes like chicken.

Some of the best fiction writers got their start writing airline menus.