I don't want to just mess with your head. I want to mess with your life.... I want you to miss appointments, burn dinner, skip your homework. I want you to tell your wife to take that moonlight stroll on the beach at Waikiki with the resort tennis pro while you read a few more chapters.

When you write a book, you spend day after day scanning and identifying the trees. When you’re done, you have to step back and look at the forest.

Her body was wrapped in shadows like moth wings, like rose-petals.

Of course when you were running with the bottom dogs, what you mostly saw were paws, claws, and assholes.

You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or even despair - the sense that you can never completely put on the page what's in your mind and heart. You can come to the act with your fists clenched and your eyes narrowed, ready to kick ass and take down names. You can come to it because you want a girl to marry you or because you want to change the world. Come to it any way but lightly. Let me say it again: you must not come lightly to the blank page.

Friends don’t spy; true friendship is about privacy, too.

Man has come to dominate the planet thanks to two essential traits. One is intelligence. The other has been the absolute willingness to kill anyone and anything that gets in his way.