Cheese is milk's leap towards immortality.
By the end of high school I was not of course an educated man, but I knew how to try to become one.
A sense of humor is the ability to understand a joke - and that the joke is oneself.
Insomnia is a gross feeder. It will nourish itself on any kind of thinking, including thinking about not thinking.
You can get through very serious and sometimes horrible and sometimes embarrassing and very awkward situations with humor. It gives us a way out.
We don't appreciate the value of humor sometimes.
The 'Barnaby' books were always intended to be graphic novels.
Somewhere along the line, I realized that I liked telling stories, and I decided that I would try writing. Ten years later, I finally got a book published. It was hard. I had no skills. I knew nothing about the business of getting published. So I had to keep working at it.
Since I can barely write two books a year the best solution seems to be co-author projects. My goal isn't to get another writer to clone me... it's more to produce a book that shares my vision of positive, fun entertainment.
If you want to cry, you're not going to like my books.
I've finally reached a stage in my career where I can do what I want.
I'm a real voyeur.
I wasn't always a writer. When I went to college and majored in fine arts, I was a painter. Then I was a stay-at-home mom.
I took all of my rejection letters - there must have been thousands of them in a huge box - and I went out on the curb and burned them all, crying.
I think that some books are more successful than others to certain readers. People who read my books for the humor, they're going to love one book. People who read my books for the mystery, they might not like that book quite as much.
I take in a lot of stuff from real life, movies, television, news and it all gets mixed in my head and somehow turns into a story idea.
I struggled to learn basic skills, get a grip on markets, find my own unique voice, create story lines and come up to speed with the industry. I struggled for ten years before having any success.
I like being able to provide consistent and frequent literary choices for my fans.
I go to bars and restaurants, and I sit and I eavesdrop on people and I watch people in shopping centers and, you know, I read the newspapers and I talk to the Trenton cops, and I just get a lot of information that comes in that somehow turns into a book.
I don't want my readers slowed down by long passages of narrative.
I actually really suck at naming books, so lots of years ago, readers were sending in their ideas for titles, and what we realized is that they were smarter than us. So we thought, Hey, go for it. So now we have a contest every year.
There are no crowds out there demanding to see smoking scenes in movies.
The terrible, diabolic thing with this disease is that you are always looking behind your shoulder every couple months with the most recent checkup to see whether there is any sign of it, and I thank God to say at this point there is not.
The studios have been taken over by marketing people and accountants.
That's sort of what I felt... I miss drinking, I thought bars were truly holy places.
Politics has become entertainment.
Now on a personal level with things like the California Tax Commission... I really think if people started banding together and saying no to this it could snowball and that could really help.
My father could have been deported because on his immigration application he said that he was a printer, obviously because he didn't want them to be checking his writings.
Meanwhile, politics is about getting a candidate in front of the public as a star, politics as rock'n'roll, politics as a movie.
I worry that we are approaching a time when that which is shocking is squeezed out by the Stalinism of political correctness.
