The outline is 95 percent of the book. Then I sit down and write, and that's the easy part.

In other words, the people who populate my books are more than caricatures.

In the shaded portions where the two spheres of different lives meet, certain fundamentals- moods, loves, fears, angers- can't be hidden. That's the contract.

Sometimes you can't be what you ought to be, you can't have what you ought to have.

I spend eight months outlining and researching the novel before I begin to write a single word of the prose.

Readers are paramount. I live to write books for them.

Robert Rotenberg does for Toronto what Ian Rankin does for Edinburgh.