It's not always possible to sit down and eat at home in this day and age of fast-paced living but if you are going to eat out do so as a family and support all the great local places in your areas. I'll still eat at the same diner I did as a kid with my parents.

Despite what anti-aging ads say growing older can be better. I feel better in my skin 100 percent. You have greater effects of gravity but the better sense of yourself you have is something I wouldn't trade. Women who lie about their age - 'why?'

Maybe back in the day you didn't need to be the greatest looking to be on TV and you didn't need to speak the best but in this day and age I think you need to be the package. You need to look the part for your sponsors you need to be able to speak the part for the media and to big CEOs.

I think all writers of my age who are brought up on films probably by the age of 16 have seen many more films than they have read classics of literature. We can't help but be influenced by film. Film has got some great tricks that it's taught writers.

One of the great challenges of our age in which the tools of our productivity are also the tools of our leisure is to figure out how to make more useful those moments of procrastination when we're idling in front of our computer screens.

The greatest writers of this age... are aware of the mystery of our existence.

A great age of literature is perhaps always a great age of translations.

A truly great book should be read in youth again in maturity and once more in old age as a fine building should be seen by morning light at noon and by moonlight.

I am hoping for peaceful transition into a new age. Obama has already played a great role in initiating us into that vision. If he were to be harmed in any way it would spawn the birth of a million Obamas.

As a precocious teen I dreamed of being Graham Greene. Well as it turned out I never wrote a great novel sadly and I never converted to Catholicism happily but I did do one thing he did. That is in middle age I moved to a seaside town and got into a right barney with the local powers-that-be.