No innocent man buys a gun, and no happy man writes his memoirs.

This is Democratic bedrock: we don't let people lie in the ditch and drive past and pretend not to see them dying. Here on the frozen tundra of Minnesota, if your neighbor's car won't start, you put on your parka and get the jumper cables out and deliver the Sacred Spark that starts their car. Everybody knows this. The logical extension of this spirit is social welfare and the myriad government programs with long dry names all very uninteresting to you until you suddenly need one.

I'm of an age when if I started to do eulogies, I'd be doing nothing else. You don't want to be remembered? I don't want them to be told to remember me.

All fiction comes from a little bit of reality, otherwise it would have no relevance. The fun is in innovation, take something real like this fair, and make it something larger than life.

You don't want to get that sort of sound in your writing that boing that gives you away.

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.

Being rich and thin isn't everything.