At that moment I had no mind to change, or not change, or throw against the nearest wall.

"Jeez, was that a lion? Please tell me it’s behind bars." "It’s a zoo, Iggy,” Nudge said, taking his arms and leading him. "Everything’s behind bars."

I never read detective novels. I started out in graduate school writing a more serious book. Right around that time I read 'The Day of the Jackal' and 'The Exorcist'. I hadn't read a lot of commercial fiction, and I liked them.

You can call me Agent Mickelson,' he told me with a smile. 'What about you? Is Max short for something? Maxine?' 'No, Dean. It's just Max.

How could you stop loving me?

I knew how good love could be -- I knew it was the best thing I'd ever done in my life -- and yet here I was alone. I was taking chances with my life. I kept telling everybody that I was all right, but I wasn't.

A lot of writers fall in love with their sentences or their construction of sentences, and sometimes that's great, but not everybody is Gabriel Garcia Marquez or James Joyce. A lot of people like to pretend that they are, and they wind up not giving people a good read or enlightening them.