I'll miss it until the day I die, and I'm convinced to this day that I can get on a horse and jump a course of fences satisfactorily. It doesn't leave you.

Landing the airplane I think is the most difficult thing that I've every learned to do in my life.

I work seven days a week and I work about 12 hours a day, from the beginning of September to about the end of May; the school year. I take two days off, Christmas and New Year's, Thanksgiving sometimes - two and a half. And the result is that I bonded myself to my desk.

I may be writing well, I may be writing poorly, but I enjoy the act of writing and sometimes when it turns out okay, I feel an elation that is incomparable.

Our language, one of our most precious natural resources, deserves at least as much protection as our woodlands, streams and whooping cranes.

The Pivot Questionnaire that I ask other people, when I have on rare occasion answered it, the answer to the question, "What turns you on?" Is words. Not mine, other people's. Words, words, words, that's what turns me on.

When I went to school, my intention was to be a lawyer. When I attended university that was still the clear intention; I was going to be a lawyer. Why? Because it was as far as I could get from my father's antics and world. I thought that the world of the arts probably led people into the kind of behavior I had seen with him and that had resulted in a lot of hard times for my mother and me.