I'm proud to be a crime novelist. What I've chosen is the best way to convey the questions I'm trying to raise.

If the storytellers told it true, all stories would end in death.

The crime part is the engine that moves the narrative and allows me to write the other things I want to write about.

We get schooled by the people around us, and it stays inside us deep.

Any time you have poverty, joblessness, sub-par public schools, and a lack of opportunity, you're going to have a high rate of crime.

I'm a better writer now because I've worked very hard at getting better. My long-range goal will always be to write better books.

I live in a blue-collar neighborhood, and if anyone knows what I do for a living, they don't seem to care.

The Next Right Thing has humanity, humor, and insight to burn. Author Dan Barden takes the clay of the California hard-boiled novel and shapes it into something new.

Top-shelf fiction, a Crown Royal ride into the heart of Night and New York. Con Lehane's work is reminiscent of the best of Lawrence Block, which is to say that this is very good stuff, indeed.

A leader in the leader is your positional status in the body while the leader in a leader is Christ in you the hope of glory

The hangover: such a cure, she thinks, for overthinking.

For it isn't enough to talk about peace. One must believe in it. And it isn't enough to believe in it. One must work at it.

Kindness is the ability to love people more than they deserve.

If you are a novelist of a certain type of termperament, then what you really want to do is re-invent the world. God wasn't too bad a novelist except he was a Realist.

And if there was no Fall, what then of the need for Redemption? What god was offended and by whom? Some especially touchy cave bear whose skull had been improperly enshrined?

I am an actor and of course I respond very positively to flattery.

Poets and monks... We're both sort of peripheral to the world.

I won't date a model, because models are perfect and perfect is boring.

What gets measured, gets done. And what gets recognized gets done again, and even better.