Human relationships used to be easy: you had friends, boy- or girlfriends, parents, children, and landlords. Now, thanks to social media, it's all gone sideways.

Orchid hunting is a mortal occupation.

I think of myself as something of a connoisseur of procrastination, creative and dogged in my approach to not getting things done.

Living in a rural setting exposes you to so many marvelous things - the natural world and the particular texture of small-town life, and the exhilarating experience of open space.

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

Libraries are what is best about us as a society: open, exciting, rich, informative, free, inclusive, engaging.

One of the very best reasons for having children is to be reminded of the incomparable joys of a snow day.

A snow day literally and figuratively falls from the sky, unbidden, and seems like a thing of wonder.

An ordinary life examined closely reveals itself to be exquisite and complicated and exceptional, somehow managing to be both heroic and plain.

There's a marvelous sense of mastery that comes with writing a sentence that sounds exactly as you want it to.

Even after I'd published three books and had been writing full-time for twenty years, my father continued to urge me to go to law school.

Everyone else we knew growing up is the same: image of their parents, no matter how loud they told themselves they'd be different

Just keep putting out music. Don't think whether it's a hit or not and people will get you.

Who do you think controls the Republican Party? Big money controls the Republican Party. This is where their campaign contributions come from.

Ultimately, we have to have the wall on the border. If we don't have the wall, we are doing nothing.

One thing I can say about the Dallas Cowboys: They have always had talent around them. They have been one of the most talented football teams in all of football.

Here in the U.S., we've made democracy into a science. A cold, impersonal science.

Probably 95 percent of the things that are written never get on the screen.

I have been writing for 50 years and readers still read my first book from when I was in the Marine Corps.

In the war to come correspondents would assume unheard of importance, plunging through flame to feed the public its little gobbets of dehydrated excrement.

A big mistake a lot of filmmakers do is they like, "We cut our whole ending to a Rolling Stones song." You better find a new ending then, because unless you have $2 million for that song.