I think Paris smells not just sweet but melancholy and curious, sometimes sad but always enticing and seductive. She's a city for the all senses, for artists and writers and musicians and dreamers, for fantasies, for long walks and wine and lovers and, yes, for mysteries.

If your mom is still around, you're so lucky.

In December 2011, a wild gray wolf set foot in California, the first sighting in almost a century. He'd wandered in from Oregon, looking for a mate.

In October 2014, for the first time in almost three-quarters of a century, a gray wolf was seen loping along the forested North Rim of the Grand Canyon, in Arizona. She had walked hundreds of miles, probably from Wyoming or Idaho.

If the dinosaurs are any indication, there's a place in our pantheon for the extinct. My son has a blue plushy allosaurus he calls Spot-Spot, with whom he often sleeps.

The male domination and chauvinism of the comics form is either being wittily lampooned in 'Watchmen' or handily perpetuated, depending on whom you ask.

Within the macho-melodrama tropes of the superhero genre, it's fair to say 'Watchmen' stands out for its rich entertainment, its darkness, and its lurid pleasures. Its vividly drawn panels, moody colors and lush imagery make its popularity well-deserved, if disproportionate.

Indeed, the hype around 'Watchmen' is its curse. If you want to enjoy the comic for what it is, ignore the attributions of literariness and the novelistic pretensions with which some critics have imbued it. This isn't high culture, and it doesn't pretend to be. It's good, juicy pulp fiction with a little nuclear apocalypse thrown in.

When it comes to American Indians, mainstream America suffers from willful blindness.

Oil drilling and coal mining are killing endangered wildlife, polluting rivers, creating smog over wilderness areas and blocking wildlife corridors in America's most treasured landscapes.

I can be pretty dense about my own basic needs, when my focus is getting through the many small tasks of a day's work and a day's caretaking.

I have a king bed, one of those memory-foam mattresses that doesn't jiggle as you get in or out. Even if you cleaved it down the middle with a pickax, the thing wouldn't tremble. It's practically earthquake-proof.

The summer after I got divorced, my children asked to sleep in my bed again. It would be the first time we'd shared a bed since they were infants.

In Nagasaki, American planes did drop warning leaflets - but not till Aug. 10, a day after the city was bombed.

In Hiroshima, bombed Aug. 6, 1945, no warning was given of the air attack, and thus no escape was possible for the mostly women, children and old people who fell victim.

At writing workshops, they taught us to show, not tell - well, showing takes time.

We paint a slow picture. You can see the brushstrokes. We don't get to the point, and sometimes when we do, our readers don't notice, in fact. It's so couched in nuance, it can fly right over a person's head. 'What was that you said? I couldn't quite make it out.'

Do we seek delicate phraseology in politics or other forms of public life? We do not.

I think the best fiction is a form of psychological suspense, even though I don't really write in that idiom.

I love irony.

I used to try to write around the edges, but now I try to walk a more direct line.

I came to understand that a German nudist, in 1984, loved little more than to work on his or her tan.

The Free Body Culture gave me a gift I might never have received had I refused to play along. It left me with an acute sense of the absurd - one I still cherish - to be there among my fellow apes, awkward and less than half-willing, aiming and missing, leaping, landing and wincing.

There is a lot of contradictions of mermaids as a symbol. I'm always interested in contradictions.