Every book you pick up has its own lesson or lessons, and quite often the bad books have more to teach than the good ones.

Your Plan and the stuff that comes out of my asshole bear a suspicious resemblance to each other.

And if you are honest about the words coming out of your characters' mouths, you'll find that you've let yourself in for a fair amount of criticism.

I drink a lot of beer, and that's the drug of choice. You find the drug that works for you. I know, for instance, this guy named Harlan Ellison - and he's not alone - who's very proud of the fact that he doesn't put dope into his body. He tries not to put additives into his body, or anything like that. But he can afford to do that because Harlan's drug of choice is Harlan.

My books depend on someone in danger, putting pieces together and figuring things out. They do a lot of thinking, and that gets lost in the movie.

The only wat to get better at writing is to write. And read.

In a brilliant fusion of fact and fiction, Jayne Anne Phillips has written the novel of the year. It's the story of a serial killer's crimes and capture, yes, but it's also a compulsively readable story of how one brave woman faces up to acts of terrible violence in order to create something good and strong in the aftermath. Quiet Dell will be compared to In Cold Blood, but Phillips offers something Capote could not: a heroine who lights up the dark places and gives us hope in our humanity.