Jimmy Lee Baylis was a wise man, and knew better than to talk back to the man who signed his paycheck.

Unfortunately, I don't get to read nearly as much as I want because I'm always working on my own stuff, either the novels or newspaper columns.

Sometimes you're going to be faced with situations where the line isn't clear between what's right and what's wrong.Your heart will tell you to do one thing and your brain will tell you to do something different. In the end, all that's left is to look at both sides and go with your best judgment.

I don't have an e-reader. One reason is that I like to dog-ear the page when I find a particularly good sentence or passage.

It's easy to get distracted by the vaudevillian aspects of the healthcare debate.

I think it's always good for the author to stay a good cattle prod's distance from the actual moviemaking.

A bonus, being a writer, is that the true-life source material is fabulously bizarre. There's so much corruption, violence and free-floating depravity that the well never runs dry, whether you're a novelist, a journalist, or both.