Everybody counts or nobody counts

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 greatest thing anyone can do for God and man is pray. It is not the only thing

My beautiful swan. My savior and my undoing.

The history of using mice to stand in for humans in medical experiments is replete with failures.

In the afternoon they came unto a land In which it seemed always afternoon. All round the coast the languid air did swoon, Breathing like one that hath a weary dream.

When I am asleep I dream what I dream when I am awake. It's a continuous dream.

I was a tough kid with the jeans, the concert shirt with the flannel over it, the comb in the back pocket and the feathered hair.

A remarkable feature of the humanitarian movement, on both its sentimental and utilitarian sides, has been its preoccupation with the lot of the masses.

If you wanna get to heaven, get out of this world.

For me the most important thing is being a really good person, and that doesn’t depend on what you do on stage, that depends on how you treat people when you’re offstage.

I know too much from personal observation from how the poor and working classes live to be satisfied with a system which makes their lives one unceasing round of toil, deprivation and anxiety.