Its funny how you can let yourself forget for seconds, how even in the heat of the horrible, you can have moments when you fool yourself into thinking it might all be okay.
An hour before his world exploded like a ripe tomato under a stiletto heel, Myron bit into a fresh pastry that tasted suspiciously like urinal cake.
The readers are the ones who let us live our dreams. I try to write books which are really compelling – that you’d take on vacation and rather than going out, you’d read in your hotel room because you had to find out what happened. Hopefully that’s what readers are responding to.
Man plans. God laughs.
You don’t worry about happiness and fulfilment when you’re starving.
I like to go out and write. So I’ll often go to a Starbucks or a local coffee bar, and I’ll sit there and I’ll write. I can write pretty much anywhere.
Let me back up a little and tell you why I prefer writing to real life: You can rewrite. A novel, for example, can be cleaned up, altered, trimmed, improved. Life, on the other hand, is one big messy rough draft.
I would never write a memoir, because it would be too boring.
I once worked as a tour guide in the Costa del Sol of Spain.
I love to make even villains people you can relate to. When you find out who did it, I think you almost like the person, which is not easy to do.
Frankly I’m fairly boring or fairly busy. Between writing and family, I have little time for anything else.
Life may not always fall into neat chapters, and you may not always get the satisfying ending you’re looking for, but sometimes a good explanation is all the rewrite you need.
I love stories. When I’m writing, what I pretend subconsciously is that we’re cavemen, we’re sitting around the fire, and I’m telling you stories. If I bore you, you’re probably going to pick up a big club and hit me over the head.
In real life, coincidences happen all the time. In novels, they are leapt upon with fury.
I’m thinking of taking up golf, but the idea of spending time with golfers frightens me.
When you like something and you’re pretty good at it and you can make a living doing it, you don’t ask why. You just count your blessings and go with it.
And I love the twist. I love to fool you once, I love to fool you twice, and on the very last page, quite often – very last paragraph sometimes – I like to just play with your perception one more time in a way that makes everything that came before just a little bit different.
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’d never had money growing up, and it’s never been that important to me, except maybe to take our kids on a nice vacation or something like that.
I’m a little bit of a control freak.