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.

I don't like hiking with convicts carrying machetes.

A writer who hasn't written anything worth-while is a most doubtful person.

Social Media is a shared delusion of grandeur.

The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment.

Using iPads as cameras, for example, is like taking pictures with a cafeteria tray.

The Spirit of God is not something less than God, - it is God.

Next to praying there is nothing so important in practical religion as Bible-reading.

Oral history interviews allow us to document and chronicle people's stories; stories that might otherwise not be included in the historical record.

I like playing weird, kind of shady people.

A good school provides a rounded education for the whole person. And a good Catholic school, over and above this, should help all its students to become saints.

Explaining why he was forced to cut a utility player: You just got caught in a position where you have no position.