Charles Dickens was an avid seeker of names - he read directories and looked for odd names on gravestones.

When I came home for the summer after my first year of college, I told my mother that my best friend and I were driving to California. She laughed out loud - 2,000 miles in a what? Well, my best friend had an old Chevy. What could go wrong?

People are quite frequently eccentric.

Some novelists are luckier than others in the eras of their formative intellectual years, but all Weltanschauungs return, which means that most novelists have at least a chance of a revival.

Some people do wait their whole lives for something, and it's only when that thing arrives that they find out that they've been waiting rather than living.

I thought I might write mysteries for the rest of my life.

A love story, at least a convincing one, requires three elements - the lover, the beloved, and the adventures they have together.