I hear a little firecracker go off when you come up with a good rhyme.

TV news is as bloody as Shakespeare but without the intelligence and the poetry. If you watch television news you know less about the world than if you drank gin out of a bottle

A boy wrote me once to say that he loved it when the news from Lake Wobegon came on the radio because it meant that his parents stopped arguing. That was an eye-opener for me. You work hard to polish your act and then you find out that it does people good in ways you couldn't predict.

I don't have a great eye for detail. I leave blanks in all of my stories. I leave out all detail, which leaves the reader to fill in something better.

Children can find other children to be pals. Children need fathers to be fathers.

A compassionate conservative is someone who electrocutes juveniles but lets them have a last 'make a wish'.

There was a price to be paid for being interested in fiction and in writing, pushing my family away. Books and authors became my family.