When you've lost everything, you've got nothing to lose.

It was an odd thing to do, to stand in a street in the hope of seeing someone who hardly knew him, but he did not want to move.

When I'm writing a woman character, I don't think, 'What would a woman do?' I just think, 'What would this character do in this situation?

I use a professional researcher in New York who does all the legwork, all that stuff which would take me days and weeks of calling, waiting for people to call back.

Thrillers have been traditionally very masculine books; the women characters often rather decorative.

I don't think there's any great mystery to writing female characters, so long as you talk to them. If you lived in a monastery and never met any women, maybe it would be difficult.

Knotty theological questions are the least worrying of problems to me. Why? Because they will be resolved in the hereafter, and meanwhile they can be safely shelved.