"I don't really consider any of my novels 'crime' novels."

"I wrote my graduate thesis at New York University on hard-boiled fiction from the 1930s and 1940s, so, for about two years, I read nothing but Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, James Cain and Chester Himes. I developed such a love for this kind of writing."

"When I was eight or nine, there was a very scary case of a guy who murdered four children in my community. I had no conscious memory of it, but now I'm sure that we all must have felt for these kids. We must have felt it, but no one was saying anything. I wonder now how much that impacted on me without my knowing it. The past is never really past."

"I think there are two prevailing views of the suburbs in the States: either they're this sort of tedious place, where everyone is the same, buys the same food and drives around in their little minivans, or the view is that the suburbs are extremely perverse in a humorous way."

"The phenomenon of university creative writing programs doesn't exist in France. The whole idea is regarded as a novelty, or an oddity."

"I think provincialism is an endemic characteristic with mankind, I think everybody everywhere is provincial, but it is particularly striking with Texans, and we tend to be very Texcentric."

"I don't know what keeps me going. Sometimes I wonder... I think it's just pure perseverance and wanting to succeed and having that burning desire to always have success."

"I think that the proposed constitution is one of the European legal documents with the strongest social dimension I have seen since I began following European issues."