For me a thriller is a very carefully structured story.

I also try very hard to create characters - both heroes and villains - with psychological depth.

You think publishing is tough but the music world is ten times tougher.

Certainly going back to Sherlock Holmes we have a tradition of forensic science featured in detective stories.

Readers are paramount. I live to write books for them.

If you have a craftsman's command of the language and basic writing techniques you'll be able to write - as long as you know what you want to say

In suspense novels even subplots about relationships have to have conflict.

I was editor of my high school literary magazine and a reporter for the school newspaper.

When you work alone, you need to socialize at some level.

My books are primarily plot driven but the best plot in the world is useless if you don't populate them with characters that readers can care about.

I like the way words go together and I like the gamesmanship of writing poetry. It is such a challenge.

If a mark of affection can sometimes be taken for an insult, perhaps the gesture of love is not universal: it too must be translated from one language to another, must be learned.

Time went on grey, uncloured, like a long journey where she sat unconscious as the landscape unrolled beside her.

I'm so interested in the fact that we really don't know anybody. We think we know the people close to us, but we don't, we really don't.

You can go to the doctor a million times if you're feeling down, and get nowhere, but if you go for a run it makes you feel really good.

Papa loved Mama, Mama loved men, Mama's in the graveyard, Papa's in the pen.

The very day I purchased it, I christened my guitar as my monophonic symphony, six string orchestra.

I will not walk backward in life.

Slumps don't bother me.

But only in their dreams can men be truly free. It was always thus and always thus will be.

I love being an actor and a job is a job, and I'm always happy to have a job.