This is all you have to do. Sit down once a day to the novel and start working without internal criticism, without debilitating expectations, without the need to look at your words as if they were already printed and bound. The beginning is only a draft. Drafts are imperfect by definition.

When you talk about painters and you talk about painters painting masterpieces, there is no painter who painted only one painting and that was a masterpiece. You have to do a whole bunch of paintings to get to the place of mastering your craft.

Purely the idea of writing a lot of books doesn't make you a great writer, but it might be that the process of doing a lot of writing will make you a much better writer.

Mouse was the truest friend I ever had. And if there is such a thing as true evil, he was that too.

HBO and I have a deal to at least try to make a television series from the Leonid McGill stories. We're going to start with the first novel, 'The Long Fall'.

All writing is that structure of revelation. There's something you want to find out. If you know everything up front in the beginning, you really don't need to read further if there's nothing else to find out.

A lot of people... kind of make heroes that are separate from us, people who are, you know, like... John Wayne and Errol Flynn and, you know, Denzel Washington... people who are different, who are larger than life.