I love movies. Movies have influenced me as a writer.

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.

Imagination is not an icing on the cake of life but the oven in which it is baked.

I am reminded of yet one more reason why I avoid children, why I have remained intentionally childless. Children make ruthless biographers and terrifying judges.

You don't 'love' people when they are 'nice'. Don't you see that's the same as saying 'what's in it for me'?

Today's younger generation is no worse than my own. We were just as ignorant and repulsive as they are, but nobody listened to us.

To establish yourself in the world a person must do all they can to appear already established.

I believe that Icarus was not failing as he fell, but just coming to the end of his triumph.

The newspaper journalists like to believe the worst; they can sell more papers that way, as one of them told me himself; for even upstanding and respectable people dearly love to read ill of others.

You know how it is, somebody will see your work and like it and remember it, then decide to make it a role in their film.

Often a certain abdication of prudence and foresight is an element of success.

The secret to genius is not genetics but daily practice married with relentless perseverance.