Writers spend three years rearranging 26 letters of the alphabet. It's enough to make you lose your mind day by day.

If I can tell you the story from beginning to end in five minutes, I'm ready to start writing. Then it's a constant spreading out of that five minutes.

You can't take a character anywhere they don't expect the character to go. But within those confines is where creativity lies.

I have offices all over the place and I avoid work everywhere. I don’t like to write – I like to be finished.

He had the kind of droopy eyes that suggested he had never recovered from the exhausting experience of being born.

I don’t need all that much – I just need to know who my characters are and what kind of jam they’re going to get into, and I’ll write myself out of their jam.

I write because I can’t imagine not writing.

I don’t write police stories, per se, but I usually write about areas that are very panoramic, like Harlem, or the Lower East Side, or a small urban city like Jersey City.

As he reached for his Visa card, the security monitor next to the register caught Billy in all his glory: football burly but slump-shouldered, his pale face with its exhaustion-starred eyes topped with half a pitchfork’s worth of prematurely graying hair. He was only forty-two, but that crushed-cellophane gaze of his combined with a world-class insomniac’s posture had once gotten him into a movie at a senior citizen’s discount.

I write because I write – as anyone in the arts does. You’re a painter because you feel you have no choice but to paint. You’re a writer because this is what you do.