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?'

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

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.

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

Most people like a little sex in their novels.

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.