If you need somebody to dig up rocks eight hours a day underwater, call me.

The tough thing is how to cultivate a life where the paramecium of happiness gets a lot of chances to get out and swim and make more paramecia. That seems like an obvious universal goal for most humans.

My mom was a social worker. I had a pretty good idea of what the authorities can do when a parent's not around.

After the age of seven, I began living between my dad in Alaska and my mother in Baltimore. Every three or four months, I would fly the 5,000 miles between the two. And having grown up in Alaska, Baltimore was astonishing.

If you need somebody to dig up rocks eight hours a day underwater, call me.

I made myself a rule: write out of love. And when you love somebody, you have to tell the truth about who they are - not the cute "truth" in your head of who they are, the one where you did everything right and they did everything wrong.

I'm pretty much of the Shakespearean school. Dialogue is character. How we speak is who we are.