The secret is to know how to lie" he used to say, " and to know when someone's lying to you". His father, Steve eventually decided, must have known how to lie.

People want pretty much the same things: They wanted to be happy. Most young people seemed to think that those things lay somewhere in the future, while most older people believed they lay in the past.

Frugality, I've learned, has its own cost, one that sometimes lasts forever.

Tough toenails, tiger. What you want and what you get are usually two entirely different things.

Outside the hospital, I squinted in the harsh morning sunlight. I could hear birds chirping in the tree, but even though I searched for them, they remained hidden from me.

It’s the same thing. Passion is passion. It’s the excitement between the tedious spaces, and it doesn’t matter where it’s directed.

In this world that we live in we have originality in literature, but we also have TV and movies. I write love stories. I could never write a love story based on the Titanic - that was never a novel. If I see an idea that's been done in film, I try to avoid that.