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" That's what a good crime novelist - any good novelist - should do with you: play with your perceptions while showing you everything in plain sight. "

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" Let me back up a little and tell you why I prefer writing to real life: You can rewrite. A novel, for example, can be cleaned up, altered, trimmed, improved. Life, on the other hand, is one big messy rough draft. "

" I'm thinking of taking up golf, but the idea of spending time with golfers frightens me. "

" We're called New Jersey but we're actually the suburbs of New York. "

" I'm not a fan of self-help books - how can something be 'self-help' if the book itself is purportedly helping you? "

" I once worked as a tour guide in the Costa del Sol of Spain. "

" When you like something and you're pretty good at it and you can make a living doing it, you don't ask why. You just count your blessings and go with it. "

" Only bad writers think they're good. "

" I try to stress to my children that buying something never leads to true happiness. "

" There are three things that make a person a writer: inspiration, perspiration and desperation. "

" In short, the satisfaction of creating, not necessarily the process, always lifts my heart. "

" I always say three things make a writer: inspiration, obviously; perspiration, doing the work. But the third is desperation. I'm not really fit for anything else, or to have a real job. That fear drives me. The pressure has always been self inflicted. "

" I'm not a big sports fan. "

" 'Caught' is a novel of forgiveness, and the past and the present - who should be and who shouldn't be forgiven. None of my books are ever just about thrills, or it won't work. "

" Life may not always fall into neat chapters, and you may not always get the satisfying ending you're looking for, but sometimes a good explanation is all the rewrite you need. "

" A novel is like a sausage. You might like the final taste but you don't want to see how it was made. "

" When I was seventeen, I worked as a counsellor at a co-ed sleep-away camp for eight weeks. I loved it but it could be harrowing - it was far too much responsibility for someone my age. "

" The book I always say that influenced me, subconsciously, because at the time I didn't know I wanted to be a writer, was William Goldman's 'Marathon Man.' That was the first adult thriller that I loved. I read it when I was 15 or so, when my father gave it to me. "

" If I didn't write, I'd be like a duvet cover; I have no other marketable skills. Clearly I'm not meant to do anything else. "

" This is the price you pay for having a great father. You get the wonder, the joy, the tender moments - and you get the tears at the end, too. "

" I live in the suburbs, the final battleground of the American dream, where people get married and have kids and try to scratch out a happy life for themselves. "

" More than once, I've wished my real life had a delete key. "

" If I don't write, I hate myself. Simple as that. My life is out of balance. "

" I would never write a memoir, because it would be too boring. "

" I'm not very happy idle. There's always this voice in my head that says, 'I should be writing.' "

" What I want to do is tell stories about normal people in the American suburbs. I don't write the book where it's a conspiracy reaching the prime minister; I don't write the book with the big serial killer who lops off heads. My setting is a very placid pool of suburbia, family life. And within that I can make pretty big splashes. "

" Sometimes even when the book is over I don't know who's good and who's bad. It's really more interesting, I think, to write about gray characters than it is to write about black and white. "

" The most annoying and full-of-crap thing a writer says is, 'I write only for myself, I don't care if anyone reads it.' A writer without a reader doesn't exist. "

" I'm not very happy idle. "

" Writers always say, 'I always knew I wanted to be a writer; when I was a three-month-old foetus a pen formed in my hand and I began to scratch my first story on the inside of my mother's womb.' I started later, in my early twenties. "

" Being a parent is not for the faint of heart. I may joke about knowing fear, but the fact is, the first time I ever knew real fear was the day Charlotte, my first child, was born. Suddenly there is someone in the world you care about more than anything. "