I was editor of my high school literary magazine and a reporter for the school newspaper.

You think publishing is tough but the music world is ten times tougher.

For me a thriller is a very carefully structured story.

It means working harder to do the research but I don't really mind - I don't think I have what it takes to chase criminals through back alleys and wade through blood at crime scenes.

I've often said that there's no such thing as writer's block; the problem is idea block.

Trying to write books with a subject matter or in a genre or style you're not familiar with is the best way to find the Big Block looming.

My books are primarily plot driven but the best plot in the world is useless if you don't populate them with characters that readers can care about.

But one does not make living writing poetry unless you're a professor, and one frankly doesn't get a lot of girls as a poet.

I write pretty much anywhere - on planes, in hotel rooms, anywhere in my house.

To answer that I have to describe what I think is my responsibility as a thriller writer: To give my readers the most exciting roller coaster ride of a suspense story I can possibly think of.

When you work alone, you need to socialize at some level.

Generally my typical books have lots of twists and turns a big surprise ending and then usually another surprise at the end and ideally, as in Garden of Beasts, we get to the very end and we find at the last few pages that there's yet another surprise.

The recent fascination, I think, reflects the shift in approach by law enforcement officials to embrace technology as wholeheartedly as the rest of the world.

Of course, I write crime stories, and I have to describe violence and the aftermath of violence.

When it comes time to write the book itself I'll shut the lights out, picture the scene I'm about to write then close my eyes and go at it. Yes, I can touch type.

I like the way words go together and I like the gamesmanship of writing poetry. It is such a challenge.

Hardcover books are fairly expensive these days and to read one requires a significant commitment of time in our busy society. So I want to make sure that when readers buy one of my books they get something they're familiar with.

In suspense novels even subplots about relationships have to have conflict.

The best way to learn about writing is to study the work of other writers you admire.

I spend about eight months researching and outlining my book.

Readers are paramount. I live to write books for them.

Ideally, I like to integrate the human issues into the suspense story itself.

Of course, all writers draw upon their personal experiences in describing day-to-day life and human relationships, but I tend to keep my own experiences largely separate from my stories.

I was editor of my high school literary magazine and a reporter for the school newspaper.

The easy answer is that writing novels is a lot more fun than practicing law.

So I work hard to present the human side of my characters while not neglecting the plot.

The outline is 95 percent of the book. Then I sit down and write, and that's the easy part.

Certainly going back to Sherlock Holmes we have a tradition of forensic science featured in detective stories.

I liked the challenge of writing in a very concise structure in which both meaning and form are important.

Rule one: Write about settings you're familiar with.

If you have a craftsman's command of the language and basic writing techniques you'll be able to write - as long as you know what you want to say.

I've always written, all my life, and when I was very young I developed an interest in poetry.

I also try very hard to create characters - both heroes and villains - with psychological depth.

In other words, the people who populate my books are more than caricatures.

I spend eight months outlining and researching the novel before I begin to write a single word of the prose.

In suspense novels even subplots about relationships have to have conflict.

We have years to converse with someone, to blurt and rant, to explain our desires and anger and regrets - and oh how we squander those moments.

All literary men are Red Sox fans - to be a Yankee fan in a literate society is to endanger your life.

Countries under foreign command quickly forget their history, their past, their tradition, their national symbols, their way of living, often their own literary language.

I believe my publisher has shown a great deal of faith in me over a lot of years but I'm not prepared to be so arrogant to say that the long-term literary value of my work would compensate them for a financial failure.

Certainly the most diverse, if minor, pastime of literary life is the game of Find the Author.

Sex in a woman's world has the same currency a penny has in a man's. Every penny saved is a penny earned in one world and in the next every sexual adventure is a literary experience.

The novel is not so much a literary genre, but a literary space, like a sea that is filled by many rivers.

Black writers, of whatever quality, who step outside the pale of what black writers are supposed to write about, or who black writers are supposed to be, are condemned to silences in black literary circles that are as total and as destructive as any imposed by racism.

Satire lies about literary men while they live and eulogy lies about them when they die.

Nothing leads so straight to futility as literary ambitions without systematic knowledge.

Wisdom finds its literary expression in wisdom literature.

There is an incompatibility between literary creation and political activity.

Plato wove historical fact into literary myth.