The more you read, the less apt you are to make a fool of yourself with your pen or word processor.

We fool ourselves so much we could do it for a living.

That's something that is almost accidental at the beginning of a career, but the more you write, the more trained you are to recognize the little signals.

I enjoy going back and forth between plays and novels. It`s like having a wife and a mistress. Books are the wife; plays, the mistress.

I just didn't want her to get hurt. I thought she was going to be. But everyone gets their share, don't they? Sure. Pow, in the nose. Pow, in the eye. Pow, below the belt, down you go, and the ref just went out for a hot dog.

I hope you liked them, Reader; that they did for you what any good story should do--make you forget the real stuff weighing on your mind for a little while and take you away to a place you've never been. It's the most amiable sort of magic I know.

One only wishes Wayne LaPierre and his NRA board of directors could be drafted to some of these scenes, where they would be required to put on booties and rubber gloves and help clean up the blood, the brains, and the chunks of intestine still containing the poor wads of half-digested food that were some innocent bystander's last meal.