A book is a gift you can open again and again.

Honesty is a rare commodity in a palace, and that is why so many fairy-tale marriages end up on the rocks.

Writing is the main gig and teaching and performing are sidelines, an excuse for not writing more. Working on a novel and on an opera make me seriously want to retire and find a volunteer job as a docent at the zoo explaining to schoolchildren where frogs go in the winter.

Humor is not about problems with airline luggage handlers. It's about our lives in America and it's about the ends of our lives and it's about everything that happens after that and everything that happened before.

Don't tear up the page and start over again when you write a bad line-try to write your way out of it. Make mistakes and plunge on. Writing is a means of discovery, always.

They say such nice things about people at their funerals that it makes me sad that I'm going to miss mine by just a few days.

Marrying for sex is like flying to London for the free peanuts and pretzels. It's not the point of the thing, is it?