I love writing traditional magazine pieces, and especially their breadth of reporting and the deliberateness of the writing.

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.

You and I are to be a true member of the provoked generation.

A shadow archive and an archive of shadows, the literary architectonic demands a resistance to excessive illumination.

Life would be a darned sight simpler if feelings were as easy to patch up as a piece of sailcloth.

Tracy McGrady is doing things we've never seen from anybody - from any planet!

I always wanted to be a pilot.

Alchemists turned into chemists when they stopped keeping secrets.

Being A Christian doesn't mean I won't fall... It means Jesus will catch me, when I do.

Proper history teaching is being crushed under the weight of play-based pedagogy which infantilises children, teachers and our culture.

If your eyes weren't open, you wouldn't know the difference between dreaming and waking.

Everybody comes to the journalist with an agenda.