My life has been the polar opposite of safe, but I am proud of it and so is my son, and that is good enough for me. I would do it all over again without changing the beat, although I have never recommended it to others. That would be cruel and irresponsible and wrong, I think, and I am none of those things.

Get out of control, but appear under control. It?s not bad to alarm other people, though ? it?s good for them.

Fiction is based on reality unless you're a fairy-tale artist, you have to get your knowledge of life from somewhere. You have to know the material you're writing about before you alter it.

Nixon was a crook, of course, but he was also a rabid football fan - and he knew the game, which still astounds me, but I have always had a soft spot for him because of it.

The scene I had just witnessed (a couple making love in the ocean) brought back a lot of memories – not of things I had done but of things I had failed to do, wasted hours and frustrated moments and opportunities forever lost because time had eaten so much of my life and I would never get it back. I envied Yeoman and felt sorry for myself at the same time, because I had seen him in a moment that made all my happiness seem dull.

It drops us into a vigorous current, a constant state of misguided control. The doomed generation takes a final step forward, ignoring all the signs that state the obvious, and leaps into a trip no drug known to man could ever encompass.

Duke is an ugly word in Kentucky. Nothing in the world compares to the joy of beating those hateful swine from Duke.