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

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

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.

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

There is no problem this universe can hand you that you aren't innately designed to solve. If it has been handed to you, it can be handled by you. This is the brilliant effectiveness of our design.

The true America is the Middle West and Columbus discovered nothing at all except another Europe.

When people warn me about someone - the label head or the publishing head - that somebody is difficult, I'm in heaven.

The trees are our lungs, the rivers our circulation, the air our breath, and the earth our body.

"Oh, of course," said Ron, clapping a hand to his forehead. "I forgot we'll be hunting down Voldemort in a mobile library."

I read one chapter of a book and put it down. Thank God for Kindle.

Madness is the first step towards unselfishness. Be mad and tell us what is behind the veil of "sanity". The purpose of life is to bring us closer to those secrets, and madness is the only means.

What did I do?" he said. "Cake! It's cake! Delicious cake!

Motherhood is neither a duty nor a privilege, but simply the way that humanity can satisfy the desire for physical immortality and triumph over the fear of death.

It is in the interest of the wage-earner to have many other alternatives open to him than service under one all-powerful employer called the State