Nobody reads a mystery to get to the middle. They read it to get to the end. If it's a letdown, they won't buy anymore. The first page sells that book. The last page sells your next book.

I'm a commercial writer, not an author. Margaret Mitchell was an author. She wrote one book.

Some days hang over Manhatten like a huge pair of unseen pincers, slowly squeezing the city until you can hardly breathe. A low growl of thunder echoed up the …

If you're a singer you lose your voice. A baseball player loses his arm. A writer gets more knowledge, and if he's good, the older he gets, the better he write…

Character, to me, is the life's blood of fiction.

Sometimes I get the start of a story from a memory, an anecdote, but that gets lost and is usually unrecognizable in the final story.

The older I get, the more I seek to use a plain prose style, concentrating more on story.