I've sold 11 of my books to Hollywood. There are all kinds of my books on shelves in Hollywood because the scripts didn't capture the characters.

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.

Sometimes adversity becomes the fuel in which we run on.

All other things have a portion of everything, but Mind is infinite and self-ruled, and is mixed with nothing but is all alone by itself.

Righteous people have no sense of humor.

The New Testament does not envisage solitary religion; regular assembly for worship is everywhere in the epistles.

Christmas always sucked when I was a kid because I believed in Santa Claus. Unfortunately, so did my parents. So I never got anything.

Piracy often reflects market failures on the part of producers rather than moral failures on the part of consumers.

One of the great tragedies of life is that men seldom bridge the gulf between practice and profession, between doing and saying.

Whatever your income, always live below your means.

The easiest approach to any strong color is to use a lot of it, thus unifying a room. However, beware of too many strong colors unless you happen to like living on a battlefield.

Some things are so sad that they have no name. I have tried to name them and I can't.