Charm was a scheme for making strangers like and trust a person immediately, no matter what the charmer had in mind.

Unhappy failures need not apply.

A lot of critics think I'm stupid because my sentences are so simple and my method is so direct: they think these are defects. No. The point is to write as much as you know as quickly as possible.

And Lot's wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human. So she was turned into a pillar of salt. So it goes.

My definition of a man's man is a man who knows gun safety, and we all did.

Anyway -- because we are readers, we don't have to wait for some communications executive to decide what we should think about next -- and how we should think about it. We can fill our heads with anything from aardvarks to zucchinis -- at any time of night or day.

I'm not a drug salesman. I'm a writer.