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.

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

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

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.

Only kind people seem really human.

In the rare air of that altitude he forgot he was he. One way or another that was the aim of life. Shamans flew outside the self in ecstasy. Other people found love, or causes.

Everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die.

Kyoto was a flawed process. There isn't one industrialized country around the world that has ratified that treaty, and so that is a non-starter.

It is better to fall in with crows than with flatterers; for in the one case you are devoured when dead, in the other case while alive.

I do still have dips of confidence or [can think] everything I do is rubbish.

When I was a kid I did impressions and funny voices a lot. When I was telling a story I would use the voices to make it more entertaining.

Don't mess with me! I'm a black-belt!

There is a difference between feeding someone and eating dinner with them. If every Christian at home just made room for the stranger we would end homelessness overnight.

There was a star danced, and under that was I born.