I want a chainsaw very badly, because I think cutting down a tree would be unbelievably satisfying. I have asked for a chainsaw for my birthday, but I think I'll probably be given jewelry instead.

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.

...if you smile for no reason at all you will actually start to feel happy

Life is one long struggle between conclusions based on abstract ways of conceiving cases and opposite conclusions prompted by our instinctive perception of them.

Dee Dee Dee dosen't mean mentally retarded. It means stupid. This song goes out to all the stupid people out there. Your gonna find this song hilarious, and you don't even know it's about you.

When you look at that debate stage, Mitt Romney could have dominated it maybe.

There is little that separates humans from other sentient beings - we all feel joy, we all deeply crave to be alive and to live freely, and we all share this planet together.

It was hard to watch, the business side is so big in the game.

Elegimos aquellos que nos gusta, con los que amamos, no tenemos voz en el asunto.

Islamic Religious Law Fundamentalist Islam wants shari'a to replace the U.S. Constitution and fundamentally transform America.

I wanted to be a poet when I was 20; I had no interest in fiction or biography and precious little interest in history, but those three elements in my life have become the most important.

The main purpose of my work is to provoke people into using their imagination and make their surroundings more exciting.