It's the easiest thing in the world to know God's will. You just wait and see what happens, and that's it.

One aspect of serendipity to bear in mind is that you have to be looking for something in order to find something else.

Donald Westlake's Parker novels are among the small number of books I read over and over. Forget all that crap you've been telling yourself about War and Peace and Proust-these are the books you'll want on that desert island.

One thing that helps is to give myself permission to write badly. I tell myself that I'm going to do my five or 10 pages no matter what, and that I can always tear them up the following morning if I want. I'll have lost nothing-writing and tearing up five pages would leave me no further behind than if I took the day off.

Every year there's a few more things I'm not sure of. I've decided that a wide-ranging uncertainty is the mark of the true maturity of man.

If fate sends you a lemon, use it to make lemonade.

I don't plan an awful lot in life just as I don't plan an awful lot in my fiction.