I try to stress to my children that buying somethi...

When I was seventeen, I worked as a counsellor at a co-ed sleep-away camp for eight weeks. I loved it but it could be harrowing - it was far too much responsibility for someone my age.

I wrote seven Myron Bolitar novels in a row, and I never want to write a Myron book where he just solves a crime. Every one of them I want to be personal, and I want him to grow and change. The problem with that is, it makes the series limited, you can't write a series where a guy is always going through some kind of crisis.

Losing my parents was the most crushing thing that ever happened to me. I lost my dad when I was 26, and it changed my life entirely.

It were a real increase of human happiness, could all young men from the age of nineteen be covered under barrels, or rendered otherwise invisible and there left to follow their lawful studies and callings, till they emerged, sadder and wiser, at the age of twenty-five.

Oh, if I had been loved at the age of seventeen, what an idiot I would be today. Happiness is like smallpox: if you catch it too soon, it can completely ruin your constitution.

You get to a certain age where you prepare yourself for happiness. Sometimes you never remember to actually get happy.

I learned from a very young age that if I pursued the things that truly excited me, that they would reward in more important ways, like happiness.