Smell brings to mind... a family dinner of pot roast and sweet potatoes during a myrtle-mad August in a Midwestern read more

Smell brings to mind... a family dinner of pot roast and sweet potatoes during a myrtle-mad August in a Midwestern town. Smells detonate softly in our memory like poignant land mines hidden under the weedy mass of years.

Common sense is the measure of the possible; it is composed of experience and prevision; it is calculation applied to read more

Common sense is the measure of the possible; it is composed of experience and prevision; it is calculation applied to life.

I can scarcely manage to scribble a tolerable English letter. I know that I am not a scholar, but meantime read more

I can scarcely manage to scribble a tolerable English letter. I know that I am not a scholar, but meantime I am aware that no man living knows better than I do the habits of our birds.

Now I wish I would have changed the decision in the second. But, I did beat a lot of quality read more

Now I wish I would have changed the decision in the second. But, I did beat a lot of quality kids that were ranked ahead of me all year.

He's worth at least $2 million, but probably a great deal more.

He's worth at least $2 million, but probably a great deal more.

The Polar Express was the easiest of my picture book manuscripts to write... Once I realized the train was going read more

The Polar Express was the easiest of my picture book manuscripts to write... Once I realized the train was going to the North Pole, finding the story seemed less like a creative effort than an act of recollection. I felt, like the story's narrator, that I was remembering something, not making it up.

The genius of you Americans is that you never make clear-cut stupid moves, only complicated stupid moves which make us read more

The genius of you Americans is that you never make clear-cut stupid moves, only complicated stupid moves which make us wonder at the possibility that there may be something to them -which- we are missing.

Well, we can't control that, just as we can't control outsiders gambling on our games.

Well, we can't control that, just as we can't control outsiders gambling on our games.

We got some shots on goal, not a lot of quality chances. It's one of those games where the team read more

We got some shots on goal, not a lot of quality chances. It's one of those games where the team hangs in there. Their goaltender gives them a chance to win the game.