His mother called such people ignorant and superstitious, but his father only shook his head slowly and puffed his pipe and said that sometimes old stories had a grain or two of truth in them and it was best not to take chances. It was why, he said, he crossed himself whenever a black cat crossed his path.

People think that I must be a very strange person. This is not correct. I have the heart of a small boy. It is in a glass jar on my desk.

If you don’t have the time to do something right, where are you going to find the time to fix it?

When you write a book, you spend day after day scanning and identifying the trees. When you’re done, you have to step back and look at the forest.

I always drank, from when it was legal for me to drink. And there was never a time for me when the goal wasn't to get as hammered as I could possibly afford to. I never understood social drinking, that's always seemed to me like kissing your sister.

Such an ego simply forbade certain lines of thought.

You have to go where the book leads you.