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

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

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.

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.

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.

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?'

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.