Having animals in the city is entirely different from having animals out in the country. For one thing, it's more social. When you live on lots of acres without neighbors within a stone's throw, your dog-walks are usually solitary rambles over hill and dale.

You have to simply love writing, and you have to remind yourself often that you love it.

Animals can seem more pure. Without complication, I mean, animals are selfless. What animals do for us, they do out of instinct.

In an interesting inversion of status, the reigning breed in the dog park these days is the really-oddball-unidentifiable-mixed-breed-mutt-found-wandering-the-street or its equivalent. The stranger the mutt the better; the more peculiar the circumstance of it coming into your life, the better.

Sometimes I think I've figured out some order in the universe, but then I find myself in Florida

One of my favorite activities as a teen-ager was to watch television over the phone with my best friend.

Parents, it seems, have an almost Olympian persistence when it comes to suggesting more secure and lucrative lines of work for their children who have the notion that writing is an actual profession. I say this from experience.