"I have no fans. You know what I got? Customers. And customers are your friends."

"If you're a singer you lose your voice. A baseball player loses his arm. A writer gets more knowledge, and if he's go…"

"He stood with his back angled to the wall. To an indifferent observer he was simply in idle conversation, but it wasn…"

"The two young men turned and they didn't smile because they were Woody Ballinger's two boys, Carl and Sammy, and for …"

"If the public likes you, you're good. Shakespeare was a common, down-to-earth writer in his day."

"On an ordinary day the corridor would have been filled with the early lunch crowd, but now the emptiness gave the pla…"

"The phone rang. It was a thing that had been sitting here, black and quiet like a holstered gun, unlisted, unknown to…"

"They had dropped the body behind a pile of cement blocks from a partly shattered wall, pulling a broken section of sh…"

"They had left him for dead in the middle of a pool of blood in his own bedroom, his belly slit open like gaping barn …"

"Nobody reads a mystery to get to the middle. They read it to get to the end. If it's a letdown, they won't buy anymor…"