I have no known marketable skills.

Hoke Moseley is a magnificently battered hero. Willeford brings him to us lean and hard and brand-new.

The trouble with real life is, there's no reset button.

Eyes wide and blank as the buttons on a first Communion coat.

In the first batch of readers, back in the '60s and '70s, the criminal class was still literate, so I would get letters from people in prison; they thought that I was somebody whom they could shop-talk with, and they would tell me very funny stories. I got a lot of those. Guys who were going to wind up doing 10 to 15 for bank robbery, yes, were reading my books.

Seem to be telling this, but really telling that. Three-dimensional writing, like three-dimensional chess. Nabokov was the other master of that. You could learn something from Nabokov on every page he ever wrote.

The thing that I prefer, when I'm working on a book, is to do a seven-day week, because it's easy to lose some of the details of what you're doing along the way.