The man’s a born straggler, Honey thought, another lucky exception to the rules of natural selection. A million years ago he would’ve been an easy snack for a saber-toothed tiger.
The first thing that the boy called Smoke told Nick Waters was: “Your biology book’s in my locker. The combination is 5-3-5.” And the second thing he said was: “I didn’t do that fire, man. I’m innocent.
Like Richard Price and the late, great Elmore Leonard, Matt Burgess is one of those cool, quick and funny writers who can turn a seemingly routine crime caper into something special.
The greatest sin for a writer is to be boring.
Sunset on the water ought to be a quiet and easy time, but I guess some people can’t stand a little silence.
Every writer scrounges for inspiration in different places, and there’s no shame in raiding the headlines. It’s necessary, in fact, when attempting contemporary satire. Sharp-edged humor relies on topical reference points.
The Thieves of Manhattan is a sly and cutting riff on the book-publishing world that is quite funny unless you happen to be an author, in which case the novel will make you consider a more sensible profession-like being a rodeo clown, for example, or a crab-fisherman in the Bering Sea.
My escape is to just get in a boat and disappear on the water.
No deliberative body is manifestly less qualified to make decisions about public education than our state Legislature. With a few shining exceptions, most of these clowns don’t read, can’t write, and clearly can’t add.
Unfortunately for novelists, real life is getting way too funny and far-fetched.
There is no writer’s block in a newsroom. There’s only unemployment block.
Good satire comes from anger. It comes from a sense of injustice, that there are wrongs in the world that need to be fixed. And what better place to get that well of venom and outrage boiling than a newsroom, because you’re on the front lines.
I think in the old days, the nexus of weirdness ran through Southern California, and to a degree New York City. I think it’s changed so that every bizarre story in the country now has a Florida connection. I don’t know why, except it must be some inversion of magnetic poles or something.
I don’t have an e-reader. One reason is that I like to dog-ear the page when I find a particularly good sentence or passage.
You can do the best research and be making the strongest intellectual argument, but if readers don’t get past the third paragraph you’ve wasted your energy and valuable ink.
Mrs. Bonneville never buckled her seat belt, even though it was required by state law; an ardent libertarian, she opposed government meddling in all matters of personal choice.
Jimmy Lee Baylis was a wise man, and knew better than to talk back to the man who signed his paycheck.
Mickey Cray had been out of work ever since a dead iguana fell from a palm tree and hit him on the head.
Bangkok 8 is one of the most startling and provocative mysteries that I’ve read in years. The characters are marvelously unique, the setting is intoxicating and the plot unwinds in dark illusory strands, reminiscent of Gorky Park. Once I started, I didn’t want to put it down.
I never laugh or smile when I am writing. When I come home for lunch after writing all morning, my wife says I look like I just came home from a funeral. This is not bragging. This is an illness.