A tourist can't help but have a distorted opinion of a place: he meets unrepresentative people, has unrepresentative experiences, and runs around imposing upon the place the fantastic mental pictures he had in his head when he got there.

People don't like uncertainty, and their minds are tools for making sense of the world, even when the world is senseless.

I procrastinate to a point where I'm filled with self-loathing and then I start writing. It's usually a state of self-loathing that gets me going.

Hollywood would much prefer the author be dead, so that they can buy the book and do what they want to do with it.

There's something bad in everything good and something good in everything bad.

I don't think there is a national pasttime. Watching TV is a national pasttime. Really. If there is a national pasttime, it is watching TV.

My client loved risk. Risk, I had learned, was a commodity in itself. Risk could be canned and sold like tomatoes.