Thinking is hard work, which is why you don't see many people doing it.

Writing is not about making a buck, not about publishers and agents. Writing is not about feeling good. Writing is about pain, suffering, hard work, risk, and fear.

Who knows what part we play in other people's dreams?

People in California seem to age at a different rate than the rest of the country. Maybe it's the passion for diet and exercise, maybe the popularity of cosmetic surgery. Or maybe we're afflicted with such a horror of aging that we've halted the process psychically.

any mystery writer is both magician and moralist ... two species of artist in short supply.

So much of the past in encapsulated in the odds and ends. Most of us discard more information about ourselves than we ever care to preserve. Our recollection of the past is not simply distorted by our faulty perception of events remembered but skewed by those forgotten. The memory is like twin orbiting stars, one visible, one dark, the trajectory of what's evident forever affected by the gravity of what's concealed.

That's the way the system works. Sometimes you get the bear, sometimes the bear gets you.