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.

We thank you [the soldiers recently returned from the middle east] for your service.

That's what I am, Frank thought, an ordinary genius. He had unlocked the secret of radio. The sport of the ordinary! Brillliant me like Reed Seymour couldn't figure this out for the life of them! Reed was ashamed of radio. ...radio was a cinch if you kept reaching down and grabbing up handfuls of the ordinary.

I'm not busy... a woman with three children under the age of 10 wouldn't think my schedule looked so busy.

Dogs don't lie and why should I? Strangers come they growl and bark, they know their loved ones in the dark, Now let me, by night or day, Be just as full of truth as they.

Intelligence is like four-wheel drive. It only allows you to get stuck in more remote places.

I was an English major at the University of Minnesota, and I was very shy, which many people misinterpreted as intelligence. On the basis of that wrong impression, I became the editor of the campus literary magazine.