The late afternoon sunlight, warm as oil, sweet as childhood.

Even at eleven, he had observed that things turned out right a ridiculous amount of the time.

Pride was the belt you used to hold your pants up when you had no pants.

A great whispering noise began to rise in the woods on either side of the tracks, as if the forest had just noticed we were there and was commenting on it.

Nora Roberts is cool.

My wife has told me since that I was hungover every mornng until about two in the afternoon, and from five until midnight I was drunk out of my mind. So she says there was this period of about three hours when she could talk to me like a rational human being.

The object of fiction isn't grammatical correctness but to make the reader welcome and then tell a story.... Writing is seduction. Good talk is part of seduction.