Catholics don't scream about Jesus, they scream about the bishop.

When you're building a character, or at least when I'm building a character, you start saying, 'How am I going to make people like him?'

With most of my books, I'll actually go out and look at the setting. If you describe things carefully, it kind of makes the scene pop.

Nuts don’t come in bunches. Only grapes do.

They don't have a lot of crime in the countryside other than theft. But every once in a while, things turn ugly, and when they turn ugly, they turn very ugly.

Just go outside and look at something and write it down and you'll find it is a very nice piece of writing.

There's something about marriage that is not as intensely romantic or interesting as a couple's first meeting.

I've always been sort of interested in the rural countryside. Things happen out there that are very strange to city dwellers.

Most people who are trying to write kind of sit in their basements and pull it out of their imaginations.

You have the feeling that if you get a Pulitzer, you're somehow set for life.

Gonna rain like a cow pissin' on a flat rock" [drugstore clerk to detective Virgil Flowers] Dark of the Moon, p.7

It costs me never a stab nor squirm / To tread by chance upon a worm. / Aha, my little dear, / I say, Your clan will pay me back one day.

After all, that was a main purpose of science: to make things of all kinds happen sooner than they otherwise would.

Here is the world, and you live in it, and are grateful. You try to be grateful.

It paid barely a living wage, but he stayed with it—gradually and in the end gratefully arriving at the point in life when you understand there are no great changes ahead.

Humanistic ethics is based on the principle that only humans themselves can determine the criterion for virtue and not an authority transcending us.

Lovely chatting with you, darling, but I've got to run. Face it, you're always more content when you're chasing me than when you have me locked up. I think we're going to have a lot of fun.

There are no strangers in Freemasonry, only friends you've yet to meet.

Grain by grain, a loaf. Stone upon stone, a palace.

Your heart is like glass, if it breaks, it's pretty hard to put it back together again.

Time-space as commonly understood, in the sense of the distance measured between two time-points, is the result of time calculation.