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

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" 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. "

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

" When I'm writing, what I pretend subconsciously is that we're cavemen, we're sitting around the fire, and I'm telling you stories. If I bore you, you're probably going to pick up a big club and hit me over the head. "

" 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. "

" I love to make even villains people you can relate to. When you find out who did it, I think you almost like the person, which is not easy to do. "

" You know, people call mystery novels or thrillers 'puzzles.' I never understood that, because when I buy a puzzle, I already know what it is. It's on the box. And even if I don't, if it's a 5,000-piece puzzle of the 'Mona Lisa', it's not like I put the last piece in and go, 'I had no idea it's the 'Mona Lisa'!' "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" Children learn much more from how you act than from what you tell them. There are times this worries me - we parents are rarely the role models we want to be. True for life. True for driving. "

" And I love the twist. I love to fool you once, I love to fool you twice, and on the very last page, quite often - very last paragraph sometimes - I like to just play with your perception one more time in a way that makes everything that came before just a little bit different. "

" I'm the Jerry Lewis of crime fiction. "

" My house has too many distractions. There's the email. There's checking my Amazon ranking. I know I'm the only author who's ever done that, ever. There's the fax. Too many distractions. I like to go out and write. "

" I can write pretty much anywhere if you give me time and some quiet. The home is not usually the best place because I have four children. It's usually pandemonium around here! "

" I don't necessarily love the sports per se, I love the stories behind them. Also in a kind of perverse way I like to study what it does to us, why we care so much. It's caring about something that's utterly meaningless. "

" I've never chased the dollar, I've always chased the reader's heart. I love having more readers. The more people who read it, the more thrilled I am. "

" Writing is one of the few activities where quantity will inevitably make quality. The more you write, the better you're going to get at it. "

" 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. "

" I love stories. When I'm writing, what I pretend subconsciously is that we're cavemen, we're sitting around the fire, and I'm telling you stories. If I bore you, you're probably going to pick up a big club and hit me over the head. "

" 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. "

" I like to see the difference between good and evil as kind of like the foul line at a baseball game. It's very thin, it's made of something very flimsy like lime, and if you cross it, it really starts to blur where fair becomes foul and foul becomes fair. "

" I'm 48 years old, not a kid anymore by any definition, but here is a universal truth that every adult at some point will realize: We are all always 17 years old, waiting for our lives to begin. "

" I'm not a big sports fan. "

" Frankly I'm fairly boring or fairly busy. Between writing and family, I have little time for anything else. "

" Only bad writers think they're good. "

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

" The readers are the ones who let us live our dreams. I try to write books which are really compelling - that you'd take on vacation and rather than going out, you'd read in your hotel room because you had to find out what happened. Hopefully that's what readers are responding to. "

" I always think the insecurity is going to go away, but it's always there. Only bad writers think they're good. "

" 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. "

" A writer without a reader doesn't exist. "