I was thinking a lot about the aftermath of bad choices, how people deal with the trauma of having survived trauma, if that makes sense, and so I wro….

I found myself thinking a lot about my own spirituality. What it means to be Jewish, what it means to forgive, what it means to sacrifice, but mostly….

I read an interview with Daniel Woodrell once where he said something like, basically, if people had said what they said to him in a bar instead of w….

I think my philosophy has evolved over the years. I started teaching almost 15 years ago and I've learned that how one student learns is obviously mu….

It's an unusual way to write a crime novel, to have these lingering, fairly large story points, but it's something I knew I had to do if I wanted to ….

Particularly with MFA students, who have so much invested - literally and figuratively - I feel like honest criticism is something they're owed. It's….

Sam took another sip of the pruno. It went down smoother this time, possibly because he no longer had feeling in his extremities..

So for a long time, I did a lot of freelance writing in addition to writing fiction and such - I was a food critic for a magazine for a bit, I did wr….

And there are rules for crime fiction. Or if not rules, at least expectations and you have to give the audience what it wants..

There's an old, private cemetery here in Palm Springs, where I live, just down the street from the airport, that belongs to one of the local Native A….

I think, generally, the flawed anti-hero is much more interesting than the normal hero, and that's really what we're talking about here as it relates….

All of which is mostly bullshit. The reality is that it's just like any other Ponzi scheme: the guys at the top are doing pretty well, but the guys o….

I do less of that stuff now because I figured out that when I was writing things I didn't care about, it made me angry and depressed, so I turned my ….

They [academy writing programs] have no concept that the world has changed, that publishing has changed, that filmmaking has changed, and if you're n….

We understand a person with problems, someone who is wrong about a lot of things in his or her life, who makes messes. We don't understand someone wh….

The fact is, though, what I think we really like is Marlon Brando, Al Pacino, Robert De Niro and James Gandolfini. We like what the media has created….

It does no one any good to say their novel sucks if you don't have an idea how to make it better, how to approach it from different angles and make i….

I'm really fascinated by how the mob ethos permeates places like Las Vegas and Chicago. I have the book set in Las Vegas and Chicago for pretty speci….

I don't really have any advice for people who love each other and both happen to be writers, other than one of the two people in the couple better be….

You don't see Los Angeles erecting a museum dedicated to the birth place of the Crips and the Bloods and the Mexican Mafia, with a special guided bus….

I'm not Pollyanna - I know that my personality and my opinions and how I approach the teaching of writing maybe isn't exactly how it's done tradition….