My mother, a teacher, encouraged me to use my creativity as an actual way to make a living, and my father, a Mississippi physician, did two things. First, he taught me that all human beings should be treated equally because no one is better than anyone else, and he never pressured me to become a doctor.

Some things we must pass over in silence.

My father has always been the heart of my Penn Cage novels.

...the larger world lay not across oceans but within the human mind and heart.

Any person who wants to govern the world is by definition the wrong person to do it.

When everything is at risk, good judgment, not haste, makes the difference between life and death. Panic is the enemy.

If a man lived long enough, his past would always overtake him, no matter how fast he ran or how morally he tried to live subsequently. And how men dealt with that law ultimately revealed their true natures.