My mother is an attorney.

The chief and his wife have been real good to my mother; they're neighbors over there. And they haven't been anything but nice.

To make it to the public market you need just raw financial strength.

Investors are hungry for a company that has some promise of making it to the public markets.

My mother painted and wrote. She always had a painting in progress on an easel in the kitchen, so our house always smelled like oil paint. At night, she wrote after she'd put my sisters and me to bed, and the sound of her typing was our lullaby.

What it takes is to actually write: not to think about it, not to imagine it, not to talk about it, but to actually want to sit down and write. I'm lucky I learned that habit a really long time ago. I credit my mother with that. She was an English teacher, but she was a writer.