... Once I start a book I finish it. That was the way one was brought up. Books, bread and butter, mashed potato - one finishes what's on one's plate. That's always been my philosophy.
As an athlete, you're brought up with that mentality that you finish everything you start. If you're going to start a meal, you're going to finish it until the plate is clean. I had to change that mentality to one of where, 'I eat until I'm full and leave the rest.'
I have an idea of how the book will finish up, but it very rarely finishes up the way that I think it's going to.
I get superstitious. I always have to have some form of potato, either chips or mashed potato or roast potatoes on a show day.
I've never been a fast reader. I'm fickle; I don't finish books I start; I put a book aside for five, ten years and then take it up again.
I didn't leave home until 27. I was an only child raised in Philadelphia by my mother and grandmother. My grandmother controlled the stove. She made a lot of potato meals - mashed potato, potato souffle, potato pancakes. When we didn't have electricity, we ate romantically by candlelight.
I didn't leave home until 27. I was an only child raised in Philadelphia by my mother and grandmother. My grandmother controlled the stove. She made a lot of potato meals - mashed potato, potato souffle, potato pancakes. When we didn't have electricity we ate romantically, by candlelight.
Grown-ups shouldn’t finish books they’re not enjoying. When you’re no longer a child, and you no longer live at home, you don’t have to finish everything on your plate. One reward of leaving school is that you don’t have to finish books you don’t like.
I've been told, and I think I recognize it, that there's a cinematic quality to my writing, with a sense of image and place and scene - and, some would say, my tendency to finish my books the way Hollywood finishes its films.
The first book is the book you have to write to get back at your parents; the book you always had in you. Once you get that out of your way, you can start writing books.
I mostly eat peanut butter sandwiches. Peanut butter and banana, peanut butter and jelly, peanut butter and potato chips, peanut butter and olives, and peanut butter and marshmallow goo. So sue me, I like peanut butter.
We may not always finish what we start but God always finishes what He starts.
I could live on fresh bread. My parents, who are Polish, have brought us up on varieties of bread from European bakeries, and I love rye, caraway seed, dark rye... throw in some butter and cheese, and I'm set.
Sometimes one sees people butter their slices of bread with long, slow, admiring strokes in the same way in which Tom Sawyer's friends whitewashed the fence. Never butter an entire slice of bread at one time.
Nothing like mashed potatoes when you're feeling blue. Nothing like getting into bed with a bowl of hot mashed potatoes already loaded with butter, and methodically adding a thin, cold slice of butter to every forkful.
As for bread, I count that for nothin'. We always have bread and potatoes enough; but I hold a family to be in a desperate way when the mother can see the bottom of the pork barrel. Give me children that's raised on good sound pork afore all the game in the country. Game's good as a relish and so's bread; but pork is the staff of life... My children I calkerlate to bring up on pork with just as much bread and butter as they want.
I have a corn creamer that I love. It extracts pulp and juice from kernels, and I simmer that down into a creamed corn that has an almost mashed potato-like consistency. I add butter and hit it with chopped fresh chives at the end for an accent of color.