“Would a minute have mattered? No, probably not, although his young son appeared to have a very accurate internal clock. Possibly even 2 minutes would be okay. Three minutes, even. You could go to five minutes, perhaps. But that was just it. If you could go for five minutes, then you'd go to ten, then half an hour, a couple of hours...and not see your son all evening. So that was that. Six o'clock, prompt. Every day. Read to young Sam. No excuses. He'd promised himself that. No excuses. No excuses at all. Once you had a good excuse, you opened the door to bad excuses.”

“And since Rebecca already placed your order five minutes ago, I can only assume that this was an excuse to check out my rack. All done?”

“Sometimes people say to me, “I want to write, but I have five kids, a full-time job, a wife who beats me, a tremendous debt to my parents,” and so on.I say to them, “There is no excuse. If you want to write, write. This is your life. You are responsible for it. You will not live forever. Don’t wait. Make the time now, even if it is ten minutes once a week.”

“If I'd wanted you dead five minutes ago, you'd have died five minutes ago.”

“You telephoned me every evening. I was very grateful to you. Sometimes we would talk for five or ten minutes, and sometimes for three-quarters of an hour. I liked to be in bed before you rant at ten o’clock, and I always asked if everything was all right. Of course things were not, and never will be all right, but you were all right with me. That is what matters throughout the whole of the world. “You are all right with me.”

“No matter how much pressure you feel at work, if you could find ways to relax for at least five minutes every hour, you’d be more productive.”