Keeping a guy in prison costs 50,000 bucks a year. Executing one costs a couple million.

The coffee arrives, and we backslide into what lawyers do best---talking about other lawyers.

It's as if we spend our entire lives avoiding Jell-O but it is always there at the end, waiting.

An outline is crucial. It saves so much time. When you write suspense, you have to know where you're going because you have to drop little hints along the way. With the outline, I always know where the story is going. So before I ever write, I prepare an outline of 40 or 50 pages.

I did get tired of hearing that criticism years ago. That is not a compliment. Being labeled a "beach read" is a put-down. So, I did deliberately set out to write a book, Camino Island, that would be very entertaining and compulsively readable and we published it on June 6 in time for summer vacation, hoping that people would buy it and take it to the beach.

How could homosexuals possibly srew up the sanctity of marriage any worse than heterosexuals?

In little pockets of conversation, old men were telling stories of ancient floods. Women were talking of about how much rain there'd been in other towns -- Paragould, Lepanto, and Manila.