That's the irony in the work: the best stories are the worst things that happen. My best times were somebody else's worst.

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.

Following intuition allows decision and action to be made in the same instant.

Love me as I am, sweet one, for I shall never be better.

No one will dare maintain that it is better to do injustice than to bear it.

You've got to be rich to have a swing like that.

I wasn’t destined to be an astronaut. I had to turn myself into one.

art is not advocacy and advocacy is not art.

Art is - representing the beautiful. There must be Art in everything.

Ah, pray no mistake, We are not shy; We're very wide awake The Moon and I.

All defense secretaries in wartime have, needless to say, made misjudgments.

In reality, infinity is merely the distance to the heart of a stranger. Eternity is the moment of cognition.