Well, I am becoming doddering and old but I have - I'm writing two books a year now. It's like 220,000 words or something like finished, and, honest to God, I can't do that. I really do need the help of, you know, other people working with me.

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

As an individual with my own hurts, I go into the Garden (Gethsemane) as often as I need to. There I identify with the pain in the other, with my part in that pain, my part in tempting someone to wound me. I experience the other's pain, and God's pain, and am devastated - because their pain becomes my own. Feeling such anguish, I can forgive, or deeply repent, either for myself or on behalf of the other.

Nuts don’t come in bunches. Only grapes do.

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.

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