I was born with the devil in me,' [Holmes] wrote. 'I could not help the fact that I was a murderer, no more than the poet can help the inspiration to sing.

. . . why some men choose to fill their brief allotment of time engaging the impossible, others in the manufacture of sorrow.

Great murderers, like great men in other walks of activity, have blue eyes.

Reading is such a personal thing to me. I'd much rather give someone a gift certificate to a bookstore, and let that person choose his or her own books.

I thought I'd go to a bookstore and see what moved me.

To me, writing is a very physical process. I lay out the entire book with the two narratives side by side on my bedroom floor, and just get down on my hands and knees and start looking at it in that physical space. "Does this really follow from this? Should this be here or elsewhere?" I will literally cut the paper into paragraphs. I'll cut it into segments and move the segments around from one narrative to the other until I feel that I've found the natural structure.

Reading Mission to Paris is like sipping a fine Chateau Margaux: Sublime!