Don't go growing a conscience on me," I said. "I've been down that road. It doesn't lead you to anything good.

There is no client as scary as an innocent man.

If the system turns away from the abuses inflicted on the guilty, then who can be next but the innocents?

I think books with weak or translucent plots can survive if the character being drawn along the path is rich, interesting and multi-faceted. The opposite is not true.

You can't patch a wounded soul with a Band-Aid.

You know what I did after I wrote my first novel? I shut up and wrote twenty-three more.

I think I would spend the first 30 weeks not writing, just clearing my head and seeing parts of the world I haven't seen and going back to places I have seen and love.

I went into journalism to learn the craft of writing and to get close to the world I wanted to write about - police and criminals, the criminal justice system.

There is nothing you can do about the past except keep it there.

I'm a disciple of Raymond Chandler, who said in his essays that there's a quality of redemption in anything that can be called art.

Any writer would rather dig into character than dig into fancy plots.

The early bird gets the first worm, but the wisest bird gets the fattest one.

Right now. Living. Aiming to misbehave or just trying not to fade away.

When people see a legend, they call it a legend. But to be a legend, it's a lot of hard work and patience. You can't play for five or ten years and be a legend. It takes longer than that.

There's one thing that keeps surprising you about stormy old friends after they die - their silence.

For me, marriage is a grotesque, unforgiving, clunky contrivance. Yet society pushes it as a shimmering ideal.

There is a role for growth and experiencing the world, and pushing the boundaries of that, and then there is a time to bring it within. All people are at different stages of that journey.

There's nothing so similar to one poodle dog as another poodle dog, and that goes for women, too.

Abortion is in violation of God-given life.

An Airedale can do anything any other dog can do and then whip the other dog if he has to.

I knew that whatever I set my mind to do. I could do.