A lie, as you probably know, has a taste all its own. Blocky and bitter and never quite right.

There are certain things that I'll hear about and that I think will make a great book and I put it in a file. Sometimes it's a situation that interests me, and I don't even realize what I'm trying to say about it until I get closer to it. Sometimes the book after that I've written 125 pages of, and I can tell you what the book is after that. I just sort of have a linear progression, but more than anything, the topics land in your lap. I don't feel that I go out searching for them.

Since I was five, I've known that I was adopted, which is a politically correct term for being clueless about one's own origins.

This is what it always comes down to, I realized. There are the ones who believe, and the ones who don't, and caught in the space between them are guns.

It never failed to amaze me how the most ordinary day could be catapulted into the extraordinary in the blink of an eye.

There is a curious thing that happens with the passage of time: a calcification of character... Change isn't always for the worst; the shell that forms around a piece of sand looks to some people like an irritation, and to others, like a pearl.

There is a reason the word belonging has a synonym for want at its center; it is the human condition.