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.
You know, people call mystery novels or thrillers 'puzzles.' I never understood that, because when I buy a puzzle, I already know what it is. It's on the box. And even if I don't, if it's a 5,000-piece puzzle of the 'Mona Lisa', it's not like I put the last piece in and go, 'I had no idea it's the 'Mona Lisa'!'
Frankly I'm fairly boring or fairly busy. Between writing and family, I have little time for anything else.
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.
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.
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.
This is the price you pay for having a great father. You get the wonder, the joy, the tender moments - and you get the tears at the end, too.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.