Seeing images of violence - it's always about how somebody's going to kill you.

If you want to write and can't figure out how to do it, try this: Pick an amount of time to sit at your desk every day. Start with twenty minutes, say, and work up as quickly as possible to as much time as you can spare. Do you really want to write? Sit for two hours a day.

I craft everything in the beginning. I know where the characters are going before I start writing the book.

Anytime you write about priests or cops, they're hot-button professions.

I don't want to stand with somebody's praise.

Do you want to do this thing? Sit down and do it. Are you not writing? Keep sitting there. Does it not feel right? Keep sitting there. Think of yourself as a monk walking the path to enlightenment. Think of yourself as a high school senior wanting to be a neurosurgeon. Is it possible? Yes. Is there some shortcut? Not one I've found. Writing is a miserable, awful business. Stay with it. It is better than anything in the world.

But we cannot unbraid the story of another person’s life and take out all the parts that don’t suit our purposes and put forth only the ones that do.