Most people who are trying to write kind of sit in their basements and pull it out of their imaginations.

When you're building a character, or at least when I'm building a character, you start saying, 'How am I going to make people like him?'

With most of my books, I'll actually go out and look at the setting. If you describe things carefully, it kind of makes the scene pop.

Nuts don’t come in bunches. Only grapes do.

They don't have a lot of crime in the countryside other than theft. But every once in a while, things turn ugly, and when they turn ugly, they turn very ugly.

Just go outside and look at something and write it down and you'll find it is a very nice piece of writing.

There's something about marriage that is not as intensely romantic or interesting as a couple's first meeting.

I've always been sort of interested in the rural countryside. Things happen out there that are very strange to city dwellers.

Catholics don't scream about Jesus, they scream about the bishop.

You have the feeling that if you get a Pulitzer, you're somehow set for life.

Gonna rain like a cow pissin' on a flat rock" [drugstore clerk to detective Virgil Flowers] Dark of the Moon, p.7

Even things that are true can be proved.

Sarita's been so busy exercising her brain that she hasn't had time for her heart, the poor thing.

It is kind of ridiculous that a poet is expected to live in the real world.

We are nothing; less than nothing, and dreams. We are only what might have been, and must wait upon the tedious shores of Lethe millions of ages before we have existence, and a name.

Life is good and is always trying to do us a good turn if we will only allow it to do so.

What really matters is the name you succeed in imposing on the facts - not the facts themselves.

It doesn't matter who they vote for, they always vote for us.

Oh that the desert were my dwelling-place, With one fair spirit for my minister

I am not the champion of lost causes, but the champion of causes not yet won.

Tricking someone into grief is one of the cruelest tricks a person can play, and its been played on me twice.