Standing around the grill is fine, but I like to have my friends come in and out of the house. Movement makes the party more exciting.
I keep waiting for the day in which everyone who loves 'Downton Abbey' will realize they were actually watching a historical romance novel.
To this day, 'The Duke and I' remains particularly close to my heart; I felt it was the novel in which my writing took a huge leap forward.
Most fiction series are written so that the reader can come in at any point and not feel lost, but if you can start at the beginning, why not?
I can't imagine a romance novel published today where the hero rapes the heroine and she falls in love with him.
It was heaven. Forget angels, forget St. Peter and glittering harpsichords. Heaven was a dance in the arms of one's true love.
Vegas represents the idea of America I had as a kid. The big cars, the pretty girls; everything is possible in Vegas.
Interstate highways dull the reality of place and distance almost as effectively as jetliners do: I loathe their scary monotony.
Heartbreak comes in different sizes, and the departure of an 18-year-old child for a far college has to be treated as a very benign form of the disease.
Each race (or variety) is characterized by a more or less distinct combination of inherited morphological, behavioral, physiological traits.
Cows, after leaving the low lands near the coast, are found to be plentiful everywhere, and to produce milk in small quantities, from which butter is made.
Oh the Christian church has encouraged enormous immaturity among the peoples who are its primary adherence.
Inequality for gay and lesbian people is no longer a debatable issue in either church or state.
In academia, I discovered that issues and insights, commonplace among the scholars, are viewed as highly controversial and even as 'heresy' in the churches.
The church is not going to survive if they are going to tell people that they have to twist their minds into 1st century pretzels.
I find that children have very little trouble understanding non-literal stories.
But the citizens of Cincinnati loved their Reds because they won, no matter what their addresses had been the year before. They rooted for the Old-English 'C' on the players' shirts.
Donning a glove for a backyard toss, or watching a ball game, or just reflecting upon our baseball days, we are players again, forever young.
The caliber of play suffered and attendance declined year by year. Interest in college football was exploding, and there was this new game called basketball.
The heroes of our youth grow old - 'the boys of summer in their ruin', in Dylan Thomas's verse - yet we seem the same.
This illuminates not only fans' interest in major league teams but also the minors and even Little League.
