The only food he has ever stolen has been down on a coffee table. He claims that he genuinely believed it to be a table meant for dogs.

Your only responsibility as a writer is to be true to the story that has chosen you as its writer.

you pay a price for the 'gift' of an active imagination. While mine played a major part in making me a writer, it also made me adept at transforming run-of-the-mill molehills into towering mountain ranges.

In this life, nobody has forever in which to leave home, to return, to make a new home, or to open the door to someone. Death doesn't wait while we tidy everything up. And there are several kinds of dying.

The only food he has ever stolen has been down on a coffee table. He claims that he genuinely believed it to be a table meant for dogs.

While he has not, in my hearing, spoken the English language, he makes it perfectly plain that he understands it. And he uses his ears, tail, eyebrows, various rumbles and grunts, the slant of his great cold nose or a succession of heartrending sighs to get his meaning across.