This is what noir is, what it can be when it stops playing nice--blunt force drama stripped down to the bone, then made to dance across the page.

Life's so much easier when you're not always maintaining two worlds: the one formed of lies, which feels real, and the one you live in, which often feels like lies. So easy to get them confused.

Craft can get you through ninety percent of a piece, but it's art that carries you at the end.

Writing, of course, it's not all in your head. Not talking about the 'manual' act of typing here either, but that, when your fiction's really working, your whole body's involved, and then some.

The truth is, poverty's the environment for alcoholism, and the reservations aren't rich. Maybe cleaning people up in fiction is just as dangerous as presenting them unfiltered.

I think writers can get too attached to these worlds they create, these characters they make real, so that, instead of ending the story where the story's asking to end, they draw it out, unable to let go.

Art isn't and shouldn't be responsible. If it is, it isn't functioning as art.

Angels, demons, sex. Heaven, hell, war. Blood and royalty, history and magic, fire and ice. And a story you cannot put down. This is fantasy at its best.

I do love the challenge of screenplays. They're so difficult, such an alien form. It makes them endlessly fascinating. Something I can't keep my fingers out of.

The stories I respect most aren't those with the rich, dense prose, but those which achieve a rich, deep effect with simple little nothing-sentences, lines I won't possibly remember, because they simply functioned, didn't draw attention to themselves, were properly humble.