If my vision was good enough, I'd be an astronaut.

A dog could see your heart in your eyes, Budress told him, and dogs were drawn to our hearts.

She asked me why I always had something flip to say. I said that I didn't know, but having been blessed with the gift, I felt obliged to use it.

Everyone knows dogs. Most people love dogs. I think most American families probably have a dog, but I don't think people really realize or understand just how wonderful and special dogs are.

Dogs give us something just as we give something to them.

Everything we are is anchored in our childhoods. The drama comes in how we deal with it. Are we slaves to our past, or can we rise above it? This is the stuff of great stories.

The sense of smell in all dogs is their primary doorway to the world around them.

Lucy took a single plain donut from the bag and held it for me to take a bite. Tender and light and still warm from the frying. Not too sugary.

Sometimes I am so dry that people don't know I'm kidding and think I'm being serious. I enjoy this because their reactions are often funny.

People want you to be ordinary.

My books come to me in images, and sometimes the image is at the beginning of the book, and sometimes it's simply a flash somewhere in the middle.

Men are bad cyclists, hunters of wild animals, kamikazes, samurai and Christian martyrs.

I'd love to be able to write again, but I'm so repetitive. And it was all about fear. Never positive. Just indulgent about my sadness.

Any child soldier has to go through a lot of love, care and understanding to become normal.

The hallmark of our age is the tension between aspirations and sluggish institutions.

President Bush announced we're going to Mars, which means he's given up on Earth.

A tendency toward enthusiasm and a chivalrous instinct have more than once been weighed as evidence of a lack of judgment.

To me, political action involves making the politician who represents us know that he either produces or he is out, and he's out one way or another.

In the liberal imagination, the money is the government's by default, and the president and Congress determine through the tax code how much to give back to the people.

All knowledge is spendable currency, depending on the market.

I wanted to go everywhere. I would have started on a day's notice for the North Pole or the South, to the jungle or the desert. It made not the slightest difference to me.