If I scribbled a few words on a cocktail napkin and showed it to my family, they'd proclaim it astonishing and more culturally relevant than the Bible.

I hate to think of a day where a compelling book or a compelling authorial voice would be lost simply because that person doesn't have a Web site. But I think that, to use the Internet in a positive way, to turn people on to reading, is something that authors shouldn't really shy away from necessarily.

For every man there exists bait he cannot resist swallowing.

Just when you think you've hit rock bottom, you realize you're standing on another trapdoor.

Dad always warned that it was misleading when one imagined people, when one sas them in the Mind's Eye, because one never remembered them as they really were, with as many inconsistencies as there were hairs on a human head (100,000 to 200,000). Instead, the mind used a lazy shorthand, smoothed the person over into their most dominating characteristic--their pessimism or insecurity (something really being lazy, turning them into either Nice or Mean)--and one made the mistake of judging them from this basis alone and risked, on a subsequent encounter, being dangerously surprised.

I believe writers need to be chameleons, or like Meryl Streep, who can play all sorts of characters. A good writer should be able to cross gender lines and people of all social classes. So for me, writing from a male point of view would be a great challenge, that I would look forward to taking on.

It's not fair. It's not. But then, that's the game. It makes life great. The fact that it ends when we don't want it to. The ending gives it meaning.