There is no sound so terrible as a man's sorrow for his own death.

I spent the first twenty years of my writing career preparing for the mystery genre, which is my favorite literary form.

Ghosts don't haunt us. That's not how it works. They're present among us because we won't let go of them.

any mystery writer is both magician and moralist ... two species of artist in short supply.

School was a source of great suffering to me, but once I learned to read, I disappeared into books, where I was a happy visitor to all the worlds that sprang full-blown from the printed page.

If you're unhappy, change something.

The beauty of word processing, God bless my word processor, is that it keeps the plotting very fluid. The prose becomes like a liquid that you can manipulate at will. In the old days, when I typed, every piece of typing paper was like cast in concrete.