Loss is the hardest thing, I said. But it's also the teacher that's the most difficult to ignore.

Every talent is unearned, however, and with it comes a solemn obligation to use it as fully and as wisely as possible.

Inaction counted as a choice.

In my books, I never portray violence as a reasonable solution to a problem. If the lead characters in the story are driven to it, it's at the extreme end of their experience.

There's lots of law these days, but not much justice. Celebrities murder their wives and go free. A mother kills her children, and the news people on TV say she's the victim and want you to send money to her lawyers. When everything's upside down like this, what fool just sits back and thinks justice will prevail?

Strangely enough, for many many years I didn't talk about my childhood and then when I did I got a ton of mail - literally within a year I got a couple of thousand letters from people who'd had a worse childhood, a similar childhood, a less-bad childhood, and the question that was most often posed to me in those letters was: how did you get past the trauma of being raised by a violent alcoholic?

I fall down on the side of free will, simply because if you look at where I came from, and what I was able to do in my life, what was able to happen.