My parents met in music school and my father was a music professor and conductor. Growing up, we always had classical and contemporary music playing. There was a lot of Mozart and the Beatles.

That's how you know you really trust someone, I think; when you don't have to talk all the time to make sure they still like you or prove that you have interesting stuff to say.

When the reader and one narrator know something the other narrator does not, the opportunities for suspense and plot development and the shifting of reader sympathies get really interesting.

The kind of life I want is to be a person who would get a personal note every day.

Try a little tenderness.

I remember being in high school and listening to Vivaldi's 'Winter' and being so overwhelmed with emotion.

It makes me think of Lazarus. He must have had those shadows after his miracle. You don't spend time in the tomb without it changing you, and everyone who was waiting for you to come out.

I had them all fooled into believing I was normal and well-adjusted, a rock of sensibility who could always be counted on to have a positive attitude.

Life was mostly made up of things you couldn’t control, full of surprises, and they weren’t always good. Life wasn’t what you made it. You were what life made you.

Because love, love is never finished. It circles and circles, the memories out of order and not always complete.

When the remembering was done, the forgetting could begin.

The amount of sympathy you get from having an illness is paid out like a Ponzi scheme and psychiatric disorders are all the way at the bottom.

As president of the United States, I don't bluff.

I think it's important when you're acting to be as relaxed as possible even if you're doing something intense. You're basically in a state of dynamic relaxation.

It's odd how violence and humor so often go together, isn't it?

A smart man only believes half of what he hears, a wise man knows which half.

The road of denial leads to the precipice of destruction

Very often, you know, you stop walking because you say, 'Well, I'm tired of climbing this hill. I'm never going to get to the top.' And you're only two steps from the top.

To face death itself should not daunt you. Fear of death is ridiculous, because as long as you are not dead you are alive, and when you are dead there is noting more to worry about!

Well, my mom taught public school music for almost 40 years. And she's about 5 feet - and very mighty. And she would control her kids a lot by giving them the eye, or the stare.

No one can measure the loss of business that may arise from a defective item that goes out to a customer.