It's a game. We tax lawyers teach the rich how to play it so they can stay rich-and the IRS keeps changing the rules so we can keep getting rich teaching them.

Some people have more guts than brains.

I learned that lesson a long time ago. When you write popular fiction, you're going to get bashed by critics.

I don't even know what a serious literary critic is.

Jesus preached more and taught more about helping the poor and the sick and the hungry than he did about heaven and hell. Shouldn't that tell us something?

When you work at street level you never know who's going to walk through your door.

The two mistakes that come to mind are people who introduce a flood of characters in the first few pages. Where the reader has to stop and get out a flow chart and has to figure out who is who. And you just can't do that - introduce the first four generations of a character's family in the first chapter. You can introduce four or five characters at the most in the first chapter. Another mistake is to use big words that are not normally used in conversation to try to impress folks with your vocabulary.