This is what noir is, what it can be when it stops playing nice--blunt force drama stripped down to the bone, then made to dance across the page.

Craft can get you through ninety percent of a piece, but it's art that carries you at the end.

Life's so much easier when you're not always maintaining two worlds: the one formed of lies, which feels real, and the one you live in, which often feels like lies. So easy to get them confused.

The truth is, poverty's the environment for alcoholism, and the reservations aren't rich. Maybe cleaning people up in fiction is just as dangerous as presenting them unfiltered.

Writing, of course, it's not all in your head. Not talking about the 'manual' act of typing here either, but that, when your fiction's really working, your whole body's involved, and then some.

What the readers want is a good story, and what the writers always want to luck into, it's a good story.

Football's another sport I absolutely despise. Along with baseball. Really, for me, basketball's the only real sport, the only one that matters.

Art isn't and shouldn't be responsible. If it is, it isn't functioning as art.

I do love the challenge of screenplays. They're so difficult, such an alien form. It makes them endlessly fascinating. Something I can't keep my fingers out of.

This is form and content and diction and tone and imagination all looking up at the exact same moment: When Molly Tanzer claps once at the front of the classroom.

Could feel the reservation wheeling around him, changing shape so that he nearly had to vomit, or hold his arms to his head and scream against it all.

I mean, if the relationship can't survive the long term, why on earth would it be worth my time and energy for the short term?

The spirit of Christ is the spirit of missions. The nearer we get to Him, the more intensely missionary we become.

I have to remind myself that I've always known this: Evolution is not for everybody.

Publish a book before you’re too old to read it without glasses.

Knowing what’s right isn’t as important as doing what’s right.

People are ridiculous only when they try or seem to be that which they are not.

Obviously, you're known for what you do. But you still want to be known as a good person. You're a person a lot longer before and after you're a professional athlete.

The voice of history is often little more than the organ of hatred or flattery.

Sometimes when I get home after a long day, I'll turn on music - I love Latin, disco, and pop - and do my own workout, even if it's a short one. Know a good song to work out to? 'I Will Survive.

Writing is a wholetime job: no professional writer can afford only to write when he feels like it.