You can't take a character anywhere they don't expect the character to go. But within those confines is where creativity lies

I have offices all over the place and I avoid work everywhere. I don't like to write - I like to be finished.

You don't write about the horrors of war. No. You write about a kid's burnt socks lying in the road.

If I can tell you the story from beginning to end in five minutes, I'm ready to start writing.

I don't write police stories, per se, but I usually write about areas that are very panoramic, like Harlem, or the Lower East Side, or a small urban city like Jersey City.

I don't need all that much - I just need to know who my characters are and what kind of jam they're going to get into, and I'll write myself out of their jam.

The first thing to look out for after your first big success are drugs and screenplays.

Writers spend three years rearranging 26 letters of the alphabet. It's enough to make you lose your mind day by day

I'd love to be a saxophonist. I don't know why, but I pretend I'm the saxophonist when I listen to music. I have about as much chance playing the sax as I do learning how to fly.

I write because I write - as anyone in the arts does. You're a painter because you feel you have no choice but to paint. You're a writer because this is what you do.

I write because I can't imagine not writing.

Whenever we proceed from the known into the unknown we may hope to understand, but we may have to learn at the same time a new meaning of the word 'understanding.

The biggest change in my life is that I now have to apologize for being thin.

Nothing is my guiltiest pleasure. I love it. I love doing it. I love planning to do it, I love loafing and pottering and chilling and daydreaming.

I had a great editor, Rebecca Corbett, from the time I was a city reporter right through to the years I worked on the 'Sun's' enterprise reporting team.

God is not just one thing we add to the mix called life. He wants an invitation from us to permeate everything and every part of us.

That's the scary part about TV, how you'll feel about it in six years.

I'm feeling incredibly Botox-tempted as my face collapses around my shoulders.

If the boat started shaking, we stayed on course and didn't lose focus. That made the difference.

I'm a foot soldier in the war on Christmas. And the war on puppies and sunshine.

If you're not a liberal at twenty you have no heart, if you're not a conservative at forty, you have no brain.