Writing my first book, I think in hindsight I went into it saying, 'It's gonna sell.' I was earning enough to scrape by sometime around a book or two….

Sure, on a larger scale, it was healthy to have people out there you cared about more than yourself. She knew that. But then there was the abject fea….

There is the old catch-22 line that a mentally unstable person can't know, as per their illness, that they are unstable. But that was wrong. You can ….

Writing a novel in general is like trying to reach a mountain top you'll never quite reach - so you try again and maybe get a little closer..

The first sip of beer on a hot day is like that first finger-dip when you open a new jar of peanut butter..

There is a certain fate to the universe and a certain randomness..

Amazing what we can self-rationalize when we really want something.

You can't have an up without a down, a right without a left, a back without a front - or a happy without a sad..

..."better to have loved and lost" bullshit. Don't show me paradise and then burn it down..

Hope is cruel. Hope reminds me of what almost was. Hope makes the physical ache return..

I'm the Jerry Lewis of crime fiction..

I love to make even villains people you can relate to. When you find out who did it, I think you almost like the person, which is not easy to do..

Sometimes the loudest cries for help are silent..

If I had, say, a tall, amateur male lead living on the campus of a rural college (Six Years), the next book might feature a short, cop who lives in t….

The ugliest truth, in the end, was still better than the prettiest of lies..

There are few times that I feel more at peace, more in tune, more Zen, if you will, than when I force myself to unplug..

In the end, we know what makes us happy. We also know what makes us unhappy. That's the irony. We know and yet we still mess it up. That's part of th….

Painful memories didn't just ease back in-they shoved the door open hard, all of them and all at once.

When you like something and you're pretty good at it and you can make a living doing it, you don't ask why. You just count your blessings and go with….

In short, the satisfaction of creating, not necessarily the process, always lifts my heart..

I always say three things make a writer: inspiration, obviously; perspiration, doing the work. But the third is desperation. I'm not really fit for a….