Youth is a quality not unlike health: it's found in greater abundance among the young, but we all need access to it.

I have the same interests as women. Well, apart from football and music, obviously. I've always had as many female friends as male ones. The novels I read as a young man were all by women writers, and when I started writing, I wanted to set my books inside the home.

At a crude estimate, I must have played 'Thunder Road' 1,500 times.

Words don't come very easily to me. Which, given my profession, is a worrying impediment.

I went to an all-girls Catholic high school. The three things that they focused on were reading, writing, and arithmetic. My goodness, this is a novel idea in this modern society. I was really good at all three of these things. I was particularly good at math.

Local school districts should be free to adapt their academic programs in ways appropriate for their community, but we cannot allow mindless budget shortfalls to force wrongheaded changes to our children's education.

With me, writing is 60% imagination, 30% people you know and 10% you don't know where it comes from.

Growing up, I didn't have a lot of toys, and personal entertainment depended on individual ingenuity and imagination - think up a story and go live it for an afternoon.