I'm for anything that lets writers stretch, in or out of their series.

My family is really, really Southern - I had two uncle Bubbas, and grandparents that we called Big Mama and Big Daddy.

I adore the work of Stephen Sondheim. I like musicales in general. They make surprisingly great running tapes.

I'm a morning person, which is a hideous thing to be. No one likes morning people, not even other morning people.

There's a serendipity to real life that the Internet can't duplicate. Do you use the library? For anything? Well, sometimes you end up picking up the book next to the one you were looking for, and it's that book that changes your life.

There was no protection, no quota system when it came to luck. It was like that moment in math when a child learns that the odds of heads or tails is always one-in-two, no matter how many times one has flipped the coin and gotten heads. Every flip, the odds are the same. Every day, you could be unlucky all over again.

I think Baltimore suffers from nostalgia and it keeps us from being honest in talking about what really happened here. A place doesn't have to be perfect to be beloved, and I love this city and I love it better for seeing its flaws.