With most of my books, I'll actually go out and look at the setting. If you describe things carefully, it kind of makes the scene pop.

When you're building a character, or at least when I'm building a character, you start saying, 'How am I going to make people like him?'

They don't have a lot of crime in the countryside other than theft. But every once in a while, things turn ugly, and when they turn ugly, they turn very ugly.

Catholics don't scream about Jesus, they scream about the bishop.

You have the feeling that if you get a Pulitzer, you're somehow set for life.

Most people like a little sex in their novels.

Women had been on the verge of taking over the world-the Western world, anyway. Then some sexist pig in Silicon Valley invented the cell phone and women took a sidetrack on which all four billion of them would soon be happily talking to each other twenty-four hours a day, getting nothing else done, and Men Would Be Back.