I had some very, very fond memories of the people I worked with and the authors I worked with - and I won't mention any names - but as I have been traveling through rural Maine over the past few weeks, one of my favorite things to do is to go into bookstores on the side of rural routes and paw through the old copies of Tom Clancy and Trevanian books they have in there for weird old 1970s thrillers that I haven't read yet.

I made an impulse buy of a house in Maine to make my wife happy and now have gone back into debt and it's all started over for me.

As a freelance writer, I'd be asked to become an expert for various magazines on any subject, whether food or wine or history or the life span of veterinarians. I was completely unschooled in any of these things.

All books should be trilogies; I mean I think we all agree on that.

It was inevitable that in the proliferation of media and media channels and the natural debasing of authority that comes when you make an expert of someone who knows a few things and can be on television and you put the word "expert" underneath them, that is to say me, then eventually the very concept of expertise itself would become meaningless.

Comedy does offer an avenue to television and film careers for untelegenic people that great drama does not.

I know electric knives are excellent for carving turkeys that have had their bones removed and been forced into a mold to shape them. Please note that those turkeys are called hams.