I'm not very happy idle.

I'm not very happy idle. There's always this voice in my head that says, 'I should be writing.'

I'm the Jerry Lewis of crime fiction.

I've never chased the dollar, I've always chased the reader's heart. I love having more readers. The more people who read it, the more thrilled I am.

If I didn't write, I'd be like a duvet cover; I have no other marketable skills.

If I didn't write, I'd be like a duvet cover; I have no other marketable skills. Clearly I'm not meant to do anything else.

If I don't write, I hate myself. Simple as that. My life is out of balance.

In short, the satisfaction of creating, not necessarily the process, always lifts my heart.

Losing my parents was the most crushing thing that ever happened to me. I lost my dad when I was 26, and it changed my life entirely.

Make no mistake, adolescence is a war. No one gets out unscathed.

More than once, I've wished my real life had a delete key.

Only bad writers think they're good.

That's what a good crime novelist - any good novelist - should do with you: play with your perceptions while showing you everything in plain sight.

We're called New Jersey but we're actually the suburbs of New York.

Writing is one of the few activities where quantity will inevitably make quality. The more you write, the better you're going to get at it.

Writing isn't about the process. It is about creating. The joy comes not from the process but from the creation.

You can't have an up without a down, a right without a left, a back without a front - or a happy without a sad.

I always say three things make a writer: inspiration, obviously; perspiration, doing the work. But the third is desperation. I'm not really fit for anything else, or to have a real job. That fear drives me. The pressure has always been self inflicted.

I am very lucky that I get to tell stories for a living. I love being able to grab people's attention, to keep them turning the pages, to make them stay awake all night. I want to stir the pulse, yes, but also to stir the heart. I hope 'The Woods' does that.

I like to see the difference between good and evil as kind of like the foul line at a baseball game. It's very thin, it's made of something very flimsy like lime, and if you cross it, it really starts to blur where fair becomes foul and foul becomes fair.