I find that most books that I don't like are those in which the authors have indulged themselves. I can almost sense when they're writing something for themselves.

I write very tightly, and my big fear is boring people. I want them to read quickly, stopped in their tracks. I resist indulging myself.

That's what Archie did - built a house nobody could anticipate a need for, except himself, a house that was invisible to everyone else.

Everybody sins, Francis. The terrible thing is that we love our sins. We love the thing that makes us evil.

The earliest influence on me was the movies of the thirties when I was growing up. Those were stories. If you look at them now, you see the development of character and the twists of plot; but essentially they told stories. My mother didn't go to the movies because of a religious promise she made early in her life, and I used to go to movies and come home and tell her the plots of those old Warner Brothers/James Cagney movies, the old romantic love stories. Through these movies that had real characters, I absorbed drama, sense of pacing, and plot.

I simply write with an intelligent reader in mind. I don't think about how old they are.

I find that most books that I don't like are those in which the authors have indulged themselves. I can almost sense when they're writing something for themselves.