Like most Alaska immigrants, my roots continue to petition for equal time.

In school, you're taught a lesson and then given a test. In life, you're given a test that teaches you a lesson.

They say a person needs just three things to be truly happy in this world: someone to love, something to do, and something to hope for.

The difference between an optimist and a pessimist? An optimist laughs to forget, but a pessimist forgets to laugh.

I come from very common stock, and I've always been uncomfortable with pretension and all the forms it can take, including disingenuous broadcasting.

You can make a new friend but you can't make an old one.

That's what the American odyssey is really about: Leaving home. Leaving home and coming home, and trying to understand the difference.

In the America I see from here, anything is possible - especially the impossible.

Mine is not a story to tell struggling writers.

Americans are generally very self-sufficient and I think generally averse to pretension, just as I am.

Professor Al Drake encouraged me to just write the way I talk. I decided if that's what I needed to do, I didn't need to be in school to do it.

Men were stupid to forget what good sleuths women could be.

IMF is really designed to protect creditors not debtors.

Nothing is particularly hard if you divide it into small jobs.

A nutritious substance supplied by a bountiful Providence for the fattening of the poor.

I don't want to die without scars.

It takes a long time to get to be a diva. I mean, you gotta work at it.

I pluck up the good lissome herbs of sentences by pruning, eat them by reading, digest them by musing, and lay them up at length in the high seat of memory.

I don't necessarily think of myself as a feminist, but I'm a whole person.

The world remains ever the same.

Intolerance has been the curse of every age and state.