He Once Told Me That An August

I Believe That We Carry Within Us A Divinely Inspired Moral Imperative To Love ... We Have Within Us The Ability To Change For The Better And To Find Dignity As Individuals Rather Than As Drones In One Mass Movement Or Another. We Have The Ability To Love, The Need To Be Loved, And The Willingness To Put Our Own Lives On The Line To Protect Those We Love, And It Is In These Aspects Of Ourselves That We Can Glimpse The Face Of God; And Through The Exercise Of These Qualities, We Come To A Godlike State.

Good Fences Make Good Neighbors, And These Were Apparently Good Enough That They Had Not Felt The Need For Razor Wire At The Top. I Crested The Fence, Threw Myself Into The Yard Beyond, Fell, Rolled To My Feet, And Ran With The Expectation Of Being Garroted By A Taut Clothesline. I Heard Panting, Looked Down, And Saw A Gold Retriever Running At My Side, Ears Flapping. The Dog Glanced Up At Me Tongue Rolling, Grinning, As Though Jazzed By The Prospect Of An Unscheduled Play Session.

I've Always Operated With A Great Deal Of Self-doubt. Every Time I Start A New Book It's Like, Well, This One Will Destroy The Career And I Have To Overcome That Feeling Especially In The First Hundred Pages Of The Book.

Dare We Linger, Dare We Skate? Dare We Laugh Or Celebrate, Knowing We May Strain The Ice? Preserve The Ice At Any Price?

Strangely Enough, For Many Many Years I Didn't Talk About My Childhood And Then When I Did I Got A Ton Of Mail - Literally Within A Year I Got A Couple Of Thousand Letters From People Who'd Had A Worse Childhood, A Similar Childhood, A Less-bad Childhood, And The Question That Was Most Often Posed To Me In Those Letters Was: How Did You Get Past The Trauma Of Being Raised By A Violent Alcoholic?