A really good day for me is to write my book for about four hours, go to the writing room for about four hours and then maybe come back to the book to finish the day for a few more hours of it.

There is no client as scary as an innocent man.

If the system turns away from the abuses inflicted on the guilty, then who can be next but the innocents?

I think books with weak or translucent plots can survive if the character being drawn along the path is rich, interesting and multi-faceted. The opposite is not true.

You can't patch a wounded soul with a Band-Aid.

You know what I did after I wrote my first novel? I shut up and wrote twenty-three more.

I think I would spend the first 30 weeks not writing, just clearing my head and seeing parts of the world I haven't seen and going back to places I have seen and love.

I went into journalism to learn the craft of writing and to get close to the world I wanted to write about - police and criminals, the criminal justice system.

There is nothing you can do about the past except keep it there.

I'm a disciple of Raymond Chandler, who said in his essays that there's a quality of redemption in anything that can be called art.

Any writer would rather dig into character than dig into fancy plots.

Since living is believing, no one can be completely lacking in faith.

Didn’t young people care what the generation before them had achieved? And if not, why had everyone gone through those grim difficult wartime years?

It is a time for soul-searching, a time to see if our anchor holds.

Disaster was an avalanche, gathering speed with such acceleration that you worried more about getting out of its path, not finding the pebble at its center.

The golden moments in the stream of life rush past us, and we see nothing but sand; the angels come to visit us, and we only know them when they are gone.

In my opinion eight years as president is enough and sometimes too much for any man to serve in that capacity.

Anyone who keeps learning stays young.

Philosophy can only be approached with the most concrete comprehension.

Palestinians are becoming religiously fanatic. Israel is becoming irrelevant. They do it for religious purpose, fanatic, they want to conquer the Middle East under the command of the Iranians.

I think it's helpful to aspire to make films if you feel that other people are not doing what you want to do.