For some reason California's always been where the struggle is about how much authority you can impose on people's private lives. It seems to show up there most clearly. They had a helmet law for motorcycles in California and the bikies were saying things like, "It restricts my vision. I can't hear what my bike's doing. If it was on fire I wouldn't know it until my ass caught." And at the bottom line what the bikies were saying was, "Look, it's my goddamn head and if I want to splatter my brains all over the guardrails on the Coast Highway, super for me."

Seven, Richie thought. That's the magic number. There has to be seven of us. That's the way it's supposed to be.

A critical assumption is sometimes made that [Grisham, Clancey, Crichton & myself] have access to some mystical vulgate that other (and often better) writers cannot find or will not deign to use. I doubt if this is true. Nor do I believe the contention of some popular novelists... that thier success is based on literary merit -- that the public understands true greatness in ways the tight-a**ed, consumed-by-jealousy literary establishment cannot. This idea is ridiculous, a product of vanity and insecurity.

If you don’t have the time to do something right, where are you going to find the time to fix it?

Love is what moves the world, I've always thought...it is the only thing which allows men and women to stand in a world where gravity always seems to want to pull them down...bring them low...and make them crawl.

Sarcastic people tend to be marshmallows underneath the armor

Human beings have got a lot of good, noble impulses inside them, and most people want to be good and do more good than they do evil. Hell, we've had nuclear weapons now for thirty or thirty-five years and nothing's happened yet. That in itself seems to be a miracle. If Reagan pushes the button or somebody pushes the button in Russia or somebody pushes it in Costa Rica, they can put a big tombstone in outer space that says, "We gave it a good try." Because we have.