I've always been sort of interested in the rural countryside. Things happen out there that are very strange to city dwellers.

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.

Nuts don’t come in bunches. Only grapes do.

Well, I am becoming doddering and old but I have - I'm writing two books a year now. It's like 220,000 words or something like finished, and, honest to God, I can't do that. I really do need the help of, you know, other people working with me.

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?'

Women had been on the verge of taking over the world-the Western world, anyway. Then some sexist pig in Silicon Valley invented the cell phone and women took a sidetrack on which all four billion of them would soon be happily talking to each other twenty-four hours a day, getting nothing else done, and Men Would Be Back.

Gonna rain like a cow pissin' on a flat rock [drugstore clerk to detective Virgil Flowers] Dark of the Moon, p.7

There's something about marriage that is not as intensely romantic or interesting as a couple's first meeting.

Just go outside and look at something and write it down and you'll find it is a very nice piece of writing.