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

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.

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.

What is important is not what you hear said, it's what you observe.

Misery teaches you more than joy.

Your greatest obstacles usher you to your greatest rewards.

Take control. You are a strong, independent woman.

My hand-stitched wings itchto take flightto test the winds of changethat inevitably blow at the end of a cycle.

Trust only movement. Life happens at the level of events not of words. Trust movement.

I think I have more humour in me than anger. But those two things are great bed-fellows, performance-wise.

We're gonna be late for English, and I gotta take these pantyhose off on the way. I'm gettin' a serious wedgie.

Even the nonreligious may exercise aesthetic judgment in matters of religion, and indeed our age has given the unbelieving a sophisticated taste in religious literature.

People are bloody ignorant apes.

Where thou art Obliged to speak, be sure speak the Truth: For Equivocation is half way to Lying, as Lying, the whole way to Hell.