"I have the ordinary experience of being anonymous when I'm in an airplane talking to air-traffic control, and they don't know who they're talking to. I have a lot of common experiences."

"I love the comic opportunities that come up in the context of a father-son relationship."

"Parenting is an impossible job at any age."

"I wanted to be a forest ranger or a coal man. At a very early age, I knew I didn't want to do what my dad did, which was work in an office."

"Writing a story or a novel is one way of discovering sequence in experience, of stumbling upon cause and effect in the happenings of a writer's own life."

"Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours."

"Who knows what true loneliness is - not the conventional word but the naked terror? To the lonely themselves it wears a mask. The most miserable outcast hugs some memory or some illusion."

"In the book of Colossians, it talks about that because of what Christ did, we are pure. We are without judgment on ourselves. And only through him can we do something like this."