And then there's the personal question so many of Lassie's fans want to ask: Is he allowed on the furniture? Of course he is-but, then, he's the one who paid for it.

My publisher is generous with deadlines, which are never set in stone. Some writers need that pressure, but I am more productive when there's less panic.

Now is almost always the better choice. You never know about later.

But things change, of course, and so do the ways in which people see themselves.

Time plays like an accordion in the way it can stretch out and compress itself in a thousand melodic ways. Months on end may pass blindingly in a quick series of chords, open-shut, together-apart and then a single melancholy week may seem like a year's pining, one long unfolding note.

I'd rather be pleasantly surprised than fatally disappointed.

I see life as increasingly complex, vivid, colorful, crazy, chaotic. That's the world I write about...the world I live in.

It's odd to spend your vacation with someone else's music especially when you're alone. You're free to let loose, unobserved, but someone else has chosen the words you belt out in private, the rythms you can dance to like a fool.

Mind who you love. For that matter, mind how you are loved.

There you are, diligently swimming a straight line, minding the form of your strokes, when you look up and see, always a shock, the currents you can't even feel have pulled you off course.

Never talk yourself out of knowing you're in love or into thinking that you are.

When it comes to life, we spin our own yarn, and where we end up is really, in fact, where we always intended to be.

I, too, seem to be a connoisseur of rain, but it does not fill me with joy it allows me to steep myself in a solitude I nurse like a vice I've refused to vanquish.

Knowing and understanding the people we love most is a process that continues well beyond their deaths... and is never complete.

Here we are - despite the delays, the confusion, and the shadows en route - at last, or for the moment, where we always intended to be.