When we were children we were errant enough to wish to be birds for the day but there's nothing easier to lose than playfulness.

I asked a French critic a couple of years ago why my books did so well in France. He said it was because in my novels people both act and think. I got a kick out of that.

Some people hear their own inner voices with great clearness and they live by what they hear. Such people become crazy, or they become legends.

Suits obviously had helped to promote bad government and he was as guilty as anyone for wearing them so steadfastly for twenty years. Of late he had become frightened of the government for the first time in his life, the way the structure of democracy had begun debasing people rather than enlivening them in their mutual concern. The structure was no longer concerned with the purpose for which it was designed, and a small part of the cause, Nordstrom thought, was probably that all politicians and bureaucrats wore suits.

There is a neurologist, a woman over at Harvard who wanted me to come talk to them, and in France I have a lot of readers in the sciences. I can't tell you why.

Death steals everything except our stories.

Birthdays are ghost bounty hunters that track you down to ask, "Que pasa, baby?