I started writing seriously when I was 18, wrote my first novel when I was 22, and I've never stopped writing since.

Perhaps when we're forced to forfeit what we own, we lose any sentimental associations. Perhaps pawning our valuables frees us in the same way a house fire destroys not only our worldly goods, but our attachment to what's gone.

Sometimes I wonder what the difference is between being cautious and being dead.

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.

My notion of an elegant table is you don't leave the knife sticking out of the mayonnaise jar.

After my years in Hollywood, I got tired of apologizing for work that really wasn't mine to begin with.

Everything happens for a reason, but that doesn't mean there's a point.