I've definitely written people e-mails telling them I've loved their stories, but that seems more like a professional journalist thing to do.

I love sushi, but I'm not going to write a column about it.

It's hard to discipline yourself not to explain yourself or apologize.

I try to see what that person is thinking or feeling about that particular day. I just get more of a sense of what that person's like and hopefully it's more interesting than a normal conversation.

I want to be heavily tied to a city that I write for every week, that knows my stuff and I can interact with.

When wine drinkers tell me they taste notes of cherries, tobacco and rose petals, usually all I can detect is a whole lot of jackass.

I can't imagine deer hunting. I used to think I couldn't imagine deer hunting because killing a deer seemed so awful. But now I think about just sitting in a tree and doing nothing all day and probably not even seeing a deer. Not moving and sitting in a tree? That seems rough.