You can't build a plot out of jokes. You need tragic relief. And you need to let people know that when a lot of frightened people are running around with edged weaponry, there are deaths. Stupid deaths, usually. I'm not writing 'The A-Team' - if there's a fight going on, people will get hurt. Not letting this happen would be a betrayal.

Apes had it worked out. No ape would philosophize, "The mountain is, and is not." They would think, "The banana is. I will eat the banana. There is no banana. I want another banana.

The nice thing about your police procedural as opposed to your classic murder mystery is that in a murder mystery you don't know who did it. Whereas in a police procedural you know, you know everything often and you're watching the police home in.

It's a guilty secret of a lot of writers, as you get older you don't read as much fiction as you used to, mainly because it's like you are deconstructing it all the time.

Happiness is not the natural state of mankind, and is never achieved from the outside in.

Voodoo is a very interesting religion for the whole family, even those members of it who are dead.

The English were notoriously unenthusiastic about burning witches. I suppose ours were too soggy.