If I have a writing problem, the minute I step away, there's a solution.
I come from a family of readers. Our house smelled of book.
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.
I think it was Freud who said that we're all arrested at a certain age. For me, it was always 13.
It feels like breaking rules is almost a given now on TV.
I'm always fascinated by how different writers' rooms work.
In the world of book writing, there's a few people, maybe, where you have close relationships. In TV, there are so many more relationships, and they're all so critical.
True crime has long been a passion for me, but I'm also a sucker for biographies, particularly of politicians, writers, or Hollywood icons.
I will read anything at all by Kate Atkinson, Daniel Woodrell, and William Kennedy, who are all fearless.
I am an insomniac. I wake up at 6 or 6:30 and get out of bed immediately. The coffee starts right away. Then I get to the computer as quickly as possible. I like to start writing when I'm still half-asleep, in a state between dreaming and waking.
Novels are so interior and idiosyncratic and such a solitary process.
I never quite know how to fill that anxious, semi-wasted time before a midday flight home.
I'm always surprised at the negative response to the women in my books who are openly ambitious or experience aggression.
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.
Reading Dorothy B. Hughes's novel 'In a Lonely Place' for the first time is like finding the long-lost final piece to an enormous puzzle. Within its Spanish bungalows, its eucalyptus-scented shadows, you feel as though you've discovered a delicious and dark secret, a tantalizing page-turner with sneakily subversive undercurrents.
I don't really consider any of my novels 'crime' novels.
The speed of the TV stuff vs. the self-imposed pace of novel writing has been a big adjustment, and going back and forth often feels like whiplash.
There's this notion of women's bodies being out of control - so out of control that men don't understand it at all.
I'm ashamed how little science fiction I've read.
Before I write, I like to read obits in 'The Times' because they're well written, and I like the little details. It gets the energy going in the morning. I really like the obits of old Hollywood actors and actresses.
