I don't listen to music when I write, but I do turn on appropriate music when I read portions of my manuscripts back to myself - kind of like adding a soundtrack to help shape mood.

Beneath the gore and smoke and loam, this book is about the evanescence of life, and why some men choose to fill their brief allotment of time engaging the impossible, others in the manufacture of sorrow. In the end it is a story of the ineluctable conflict between good and evil, daylight and darkness, the White City and the Black.

The intermittent depression that had shadowed him throughout his adult life was about to envelop him once again.

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.

I must confess a shameful secret: I love Chicago best in the cold.

Leaves hung in the stillness like hands of the newly dead.