People aren't doing whodunits anymore.

I've never had a mentor. I've always wanted one. I'm actually really disappointed that nobody took my under their wing.

There is something very romantic about the orphan figure in American literature.

There seem to be two ways of generating interest from the reader: withholding information or by telling the reader on the first page exactly what's going to happen.

The death drive is parasitic. It runs off of other drives, leeching off of them.

Both my parents were big readers. My dad liked more macho adventure books like Shogun or spy novels. My mother reads murder mysteries. In fact, so does her mother, my grandma.

I would stay at my grandma's house on my birthday every year and I remember she had a bookshelf of murder mystery books along with really frightening books, like one on Jack the Ripper. She also had a poster of a shark in the closet which also terrified me at the time.