The research is the most interesting part… That’s how I work. I go some place and I walk it and I talk to people until I find what I’ve come for. Or not. Fortunately, I tend to find what I’m after.

As a novelist, I tell stories and people give me money. Then financial planners tell me stories and I give them money.

Because normal human activity is worse for nature than the greatest nuclear accident in history.

Then there was the whole concept of coal mining, which is a culture unto itself, the most dangerous occupation in the world, and which draws and develops a certain kind of man.

The research is the most interesting part… That’s how I work. I go some place and I walk it and I talk to people until I find what I’ve come for. Or not. Fortunately, I tend to find what I’m after.

Happiness is the maximum agreement of reality and desire.

Mystery books. I must read a hundred a year. . . I just wish some of them were harder to figure out.