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.

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 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.

What is important is not what you hear said, it's what you observe.

All people who made it at one time thought they could never make it.

Greatly his foes he dreads, but more his friends; He hurts me most who lavishly commends.

I guess I'm growing up in the film world.

I want to try to keep my life the same.

A prudent speculator never argues with the tape. Markets are never wrong, opinions often are.

It's taken me 15 years to step behind a camera and make something everyone agrees looks like a movie.

Tis curious that we only believe as deeply as we live.

Neither have they hearts to stay, nor wit enough to run away.

How can one not be fond of something that the Daily Mail despises?

Virtuous men alone possess friends.