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.

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?'

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.

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

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

How do you tell a Communist? Well, it’s someone who reads Marx and Lenin. And how do you tell an anti-Communist? It’s someone who understands Marx and Lenin.

Distance is a bridge, not a gulf, between lovers.

We know that he has stored secret supplies of biological and chemical weapons throughout his country.

People … don't want to be cured or changed or eliminated. They want to be whoever it is that they've come to be.

it was a bitter and biting iron-gray afternoon, that clanked like armor and was as cold as a frosty axehead.

Without dark clouds in our lives, we would never know the joy of sunshine. We can become callous and unteachable if we do not learn from pain.

Being in a room with other people's energy yields such a different result. I love writing by myself still, but there's something amazing about sharing that experience with someone else.

Verse is a mechanism by which we can create interpretative illusions suggesting profoundities of response and understanding which far exceed the engagement or research of the writer.

The way it is now, the asylums can hold the sane people, but if we tried to shut up the insane we should run out of building materials.

An injurious lie is an uncommendable thing; and so, also, and in the same degree, is an injurious truth a fact that is recognized by the law of libel .