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.

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

Gonna rain like a cow pissin' on a flat rock" [drugstore clerk to detective Virgil Flowers] Dark of the Moon, p.7

Most people who are trying to write kind of sit in their basements and pull it out of their imaginations.

There's something about marriage that is not as intensely romantic or interesting as a couple's first meeting.