I thought of the words of the Renaissance philosopher Michel de Montaigne. "If you press me to say why I loved him, I can say no more than because he was he, and I was I.

Then, like a born and bred asshole, he added to the sheriff, "He writes murder mysteries.

Focus on someone else’s problems for a change, I instructed myself. You need the practice. From now on you’ll have to live in a world you didn’t make up. Horrible thought.

To find them all in one package...well, perhaps better not to dwell on his package in my fragile state.

And I thought maybe I didn't need to worry about my heart anymore because it had stopped beating a couple of seconds earlier, and I was still sitting there living and breathing-though admittedly I wasn't feeling much of anything.

You know that thing about Death Be Not Proud? Well, Fear Be Not Proud either. And Fear Be Not Elegant. What Fear be is stumbling, bumbling flight, crashing through brush, slip-sliding on pine needles, sloshing through puddles that are always deeper than you expect.

I want people to react to my work, to think, to question, to challenge, to cry and laugh and feel.