Many openly show discontentment with their looks but few with their intelligence. I however assure you there are many more plain minds than faces.

Many who have had an opportunity of knowing any more about mathematics confuse it with arithmetic and consider it an arid science. In reality however it is a science which requires a great amount of imagination.

People who think my books are autobiographical which they're not credit me with having a much better memory than I do. I do however have a powerful imagination.

The level of our success is limited only by our imagination and no act of kindness however small is ever wasted.

However my parents - both of whom came from impoverished backgrounds and neither of whom had been to college took the view that my overactive imagination was an amusing quirk that would never pay a mortgage or secure a pension.

However frat-boy humor is funny and it always will be.

Wherever my story takes me however dark and difficult the theme there is always some hope and redemption not because readers like happy endings but because I am an optimist at heart. I know the sun will rise in the morning that there is a light at the end of every tunnel.

For all their current prestige Osama bin Laden and the suicide bombers are still regarded in all but the most desperate districts of Gaza or Peshawar as romantics with little chance of more than symbolic victories however bloody and brutal. That gives both the Middle East and the West a small and distant hope of security.

However I was a restaurant critic at Chicago magazine before I worked at Esquire and I've been a really enthusiastic home cook for a long time. It's just something I'm passionate about.

However painful the process of leaving home for parents and for children the really frightening thing for both would be the prospect of the child never leaving home.