Always continue the climb. It is possible for you to do whatever you choose if you first get to know who you are and are willing to work with a power that is greater than ourselves to do it.

I woke up on the plane this morning and was turning on my phone and I had to put my pin number in. That's when I realized that since the age of 10 I've been using 2012 as my pin number. But now that I've won gold in the 2012 Olympics I've achieved that goal and for the first time in 14 years I'll have to change my pin.

For the first-time novelist you've got to get up at 5:30 in the morning and write until 7 make breakfast and go to work. Or come home and work for an hour. Everybody has an hour in their day somewhere.

I was the first in my peer group to get pregnant. All I craved was reassurance. I needed someone to tell me that all the seemingly random symptoms I had - weird things such as excess saliva - were normal. And I was worried because I wasn't getting any morning sickness.

When I run in the morning my body spends the first 20 minutes trying to figure out what's happening to it.

I doing casual labor by the day. They wouldn't pay you until the next morning. There was a bar that would cash your check if you bought a beer first. A lot of guys never left until they'd drunk up all their money.

It's very much like opera singers. They do the same thing. The first thing in the morning and the last thing at night the thing they think about is their voice and how to take care of it.

My first care the following morning was to devise some means of discovering the man in the grey cloak.

Now the only thing I miss about sex is the cigarette afterward. Next to the first one in the morning it's the best one of all. It tasted so good that even if I had been frigid I would have pretended otherwise just to be able to smoke it.

When I got my very first phone call that I'd hit the 'New York Times' list I had a small rush of 'I've made it!' But the next morning it occurred to me I didn't know what it was so I called my agent and asked what being a 'New York Times' bestselling author really meant. He informed me that I was now a thousand pound gorilla.