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

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

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

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

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.

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?'

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.