The crime part is the engine that moves the narrative and allows me to write the other things I want to write about.

If the storytellers told it true, all stories would end in death.

We get schooled by the people around us, and it stays inside us deep.

Any time you have poverty, joblessness, sub-par public schools, and a lack of opportunity, you're going to have a high rate of crime.

I'm a better writer now because I've worked very hard at getting better. My long-range goal will always be to write better books.

I'm proud to be a crime novelist. What I've chosen is the best way to convey the questions I'm trying to raise.

I live in a blue-collar neighborhood, and if anyone knows what I do for a living, they don't seem to care.

The Next Right Thing has humanity, humor, and insight to burn. Author Dan Barden takes the clay of the California hard-boiled novel and shapes it into something new.

Top-shelf fiction, a Crown Royal ride into the heart of Night and New York. Con Lehane's work is reminiscent of the best of Lawrence Block, which is to say that this is very good stuff, indeed.

Ladies, when you write a poem for Feminism because that is what we sometimes do, remember that it's never about them. It's only about you.

The world in which you were born is just one model of reality. Other cultures are not failed attempts at being YOU: they are unique manifestations of the human spirit.

If my dog wants to know why I didn't feed him this morning, he may want to rethink walking out of the room when I'm telling him a joke.

As a professional journalist, I have always been fascinated by people who appear to have even more spare time than I do.

There's a bootleg album that was recorded when I was 14 or 15, a compilation of things live at different clubs. Songs like Girl from Ipanema and Cry Me A River. I don't know what the title of it is.

When I was twelve, I started reading Eudora Welty, Thomas Wolfe, Flannery O'Connor, James Agee, and - do we dare breathe the name - William Faulkner.

I bought these shoes in Taiwan, and they said in the inside "made around the corner."

The natural man "cannot see or discern that divine excellency in the Scripture, without an apprehension whereof no man can believe it aright to be the word of God."

I thought it was supposed to be impossible to sneak up on you. Eyes of a hawk and ears of a wolf and all.

We've been there on World Wars, it's time for World Party I.