It is the job of the novelist to touch the reader.

Lots of people want to have written; they don't want to write. In other words, they want to see their name on the front cover of a book and their grinning picture on the back. But this is what comes at the end of a job, not at the beginning.

I wish that I had known back then that a mastery of process would lead to a product. Then I probably wouldn't have found it so frightening to write.

What we are is what we were always meant to be, and that's writers.

We do a lot of lifting, and mix it up with upper body and lower body. A lot of circuit training for cardio. I hate just doing long distance running, so I do 5 or 6 different exercises for 20 to 30 seconds then move to the next one.

Small businesses pay 18 percent more than big businesses for health care, the same health care, just because they're small and they have too small a pool of risk.

My big thing is I think women should birth their babies, as long as they're healthy and their doctor says it's OK, however they want, whether that means in the hospital with no drugs, at home with an epidural, elective C-section, whatever.

If I'm serious about patients and their GPs being able to have more control of their health care, I can't have a top-down system that imposes restrictions on the services they need.