I'm not 'Mr. No-By-The-Book.' I just want to make sure the character is by the book.

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.

Is there love without an action? No! Love is an active word.

Rest assured you make perfectly good nonsense.  I understand you one-hundred-percent not at all.

One should eat to live, not live to eat.

Under no stretch of imagination can war be regarded as an ethical process; yet war, force, terror, and propaganda were the evolutionary means employed to weld the German people into a tribal whole.

Frontline' does 10 news shows a year, so one a week is quite an undertaking.

I don't want anything given to me.

Almsgiving tends to perpetuate poverty; aid does away with it once and for all

He that goeth farre hath many encounters.

Why would people have confidence in a female director when there are so few?

One of the great things about having been on Lost is people coming up and feeling so enthusiastic about the show and saying, "Oh it provided us so much entertainment," or "It inspired conversations."