Now is almost always the better choice. You never know about later.

When most of us talk to our dogs, we tend to forget that they're not people.

My publisher is generous with deadlines, which are never set in stone. Some writers need that pressure, but I am more productive when there's less panic.

All I meant was that people take their same old lives wherever they go. No place is perfect enough to strip you of that. And some places have a way of magnifying your demons, or of, I don't know, giving them pep pills.

I'd rather be pleasantly surprised than fatally disappointed.

Thanks to Granna, Werner and Walter had grown up to be highly functioning, productive citizens - but if you were to ask Walter, Werner had a far easier time of it and lived his life with the sanctified nonchalance of those who will do anything to avoid dissecting their souls.

But things change, of course, and so do the ways in which people see themselves.