Those of us who frequent the band room have long suspected that Becca maintains her lovely figure by eating nothing but the souls of kittens and the dreams of impoverished children.

If we'd put them in a vase in the living room, they would have been everyone's flowers. I wanted them to be my flowers.

Becoming a father made me much more interested in the parent character in my novels. I've never found parents that interesting.

The book was turned to the page with Anne Frank's name, but what got me about it was the fact that right beneath her name there were four Aron Franks. FOUR. Four Aron Franks without museums, without historical markers, without anyone to mourn them. I silently resolved to remember and pray for the four Aron Franks as long as I was around.

But to be perfectly frank, this childish idea that the author of a novel has some special insight into the characters in the novel ... it's ridiculous. That novel was composed of scratches on a page, dear. The characters inhabiting it have no life outside of those scratches. What happened to them? They all ceased to exist the moment the novel ended.

You never know. It's just. It's like. POOF. And you're gone.

It was psychological trick called empathic listening. You say what the person is feeling so they feel understood.