Novelist

All writers start out mimicking other writers. I've never relinquished that. I have a good ear for speech and writing patterns.

There was a time, after I earned my graduate degree and before I sold my first novel, when it looked like I might have to get an office job.

We crime novelists have a great pulpit. We write about justice and about correcting injustice.

Trying to catch hold of yourself is a fool's errand. There is no you, only a series of former yous, created in one instant, deleted in the next.

I prefer to write about ordinary people who find themselves in a singularly bizarre situation - that is to say, the one moment in their lives when they are forced to confront danger or mystery.

It's impossible for me to disentangle how much of my storytelling urge is the product of growing up with novelist parents and how much is a genetic legacy from those same parents.

Being a member of the Nintendo generation, I've got a really short attention span.

Aside from a brief stint as a writing tutor during graduate school, I have managed to avoid respectable employment all my adult life.

Writing is just something I've always done. It's just kind of the reality of who I am.

Crime novels have a clear beginning, middle, and end: a mystery, its investigation, and its resolution. The reader expects events to play out logically and efficiently, and these expectations force the writer to spend a good deal of time working on macrostructure rather than prettifying individual sentences.

I think everyone assumes that I talk to my parents a lot about writing, but I didn't - they're my parents. We didn't have constant workshops running in my household.

It's not as though I decided to sit down and write a mystery novel so I could capitalize on my parents' success.

Science, literature, and common sense tell us that the self is a fickle thing, subject to revision in real time, and that the chasm that exists between any two people exists inside each and every one of us.