Trying to write books with a subject matter or in a genre or style you're not familiar with is the best way to find the Big Block looming.

I also try very hard to create characters - both heroes and villains - with psychological depth.

You think publishing is tough but the music world is ten times tougher.

Certainly going back to Sherlock Holmes we have a tradition of forensic science featured in detective stories.

Readers are paramount. I live to write books for them.

If you have a craftsman's command of the language and basic writing techniques you'll be able to write - as long as you know what you want to say

In suspense novels even subplots about relationships have to have conflict.

I was editor of my high school literary magazine and a reporter for the school newspaper.

When you work alone, you need to socialize at some level.

My books are primarily plot driven but the best plot in the world is useless if you don't populate them with characters that readers can care about.

I like the way words go together and I like the gamesmanship of writing poetry. It is such a challenge.

Love is possession, a sort of vanity.

Innovation transforms the useful seeds of invention into widely adopted solutions valued above every existing alternative.

Everyone is a proponent of strong encryption.

Political freedom is, or ought to be, the best guaranty for the safety and continuance of spiritual, mental, and civil freedom. It is the combination of numbers to secure the liberty to each one.

Welcome to the Salvation Army. I've never been associated with an offense so nice about giving the ball away.

Every day I get more and more honest.

Today's competitiveness, so much imposed from without, is exhausting, not exhilarating; is unending-a part of one's social life, one's solitude, one's sleep, one's sleeplessness.

Teenagers blithely skip off to uncertain futures, while their parents sit weeping curbside in the Volvo, because the adolescent brain isn't yet formed enough to recognize and evaluate risk.

Most of what you see in architecture are watered-down ideas of sculptors who have come before.

Everyone knows innovation involves developing unique understanding of a market, thinking expansively to develop a solution, and then finding a way to test rigorously and adapt quickly.