Tragedy is a hell of a teacher. It's much too strict, but it's a hell of a teacher..

Frankly I'm fairly boring or fairly busy. Between writing and family, I have little time for anything else..

Part of the human condition is that we all think that we are uniquely complex while everyone else is somewhat simpler to read. That is not true, of c….

There are three things that make a person a writer: inspiration, perspiration and desperation..

...desperation can toy with you and if you give desperation any wiggle room, it will find alternative answers.

Hope can be the most wonderful thing in the world or it can crush your heart like an eggshell..

That’s the problem with falling in love. It makes you start talking like a bad country song.

For a short time, I hated them. But when you think about it, what good does that do?It takes so much to hold on to hate—you lose your grip on what's ….

A novel is like a sausage. You might like the final taste but you don't want to see how it was made..

I would rather raise certain topics and maybe let you ruminate on them. I'm not big on answering them..

You bring your own weather to the picnic..

I once worked as a tour guide in the Costa del Sol of Spain..

But sometimes, maybe most times, it isn't that clear. It is dark and you are near the edge of a cliff, but you're moving slowly, not sure which direc….

The book I always say that influenced me, subconsciously, because at the time I didn't know I wanted to be a writer, was William Goldman's 'Marathon ….

No, I don’t live in heartache. I don’t cry myself to sleep or any of that. I am, I tell myself, over it. But I do feel a void, icky as that sounds. A….

Kate Atkinson is an absolute must-read. I love everything she writes..

I like to see the difference between good and evil as kind of like the foul line at a baseball game. It's very thin, it's made of something very flim….

And I love the twist. I love to fool you once, I love to fool you twice, and on the very last page, quite often - very last paragraph sometimes - I l….

I don't necessarily love the sports per se, I love the stories behind them. Also in a kind of perverse way I like to study what it does to us, why we….

I'm not very happy idle. There's always this voice in my head that says, 'I should be writing..

No characters in 'Stay Close,' including the leads, are black and white. I want them to be grey. I think that makes for a much more interesting readi….