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?'

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.

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.

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.

Just go outside and look at something and write it down and you'll find it is a very nice piece of writing.

I've always been sort of interested in the rural countryside. Things happen out there that are very strange to city dwellers.