I travel, a lot, to research the locales for the books. I have professional contacts that I can ask questions of or show them scenes to vet.

It's not at all uncommon for a writer to get a ton of publicity for one book and then not get as much for the next one. I don't worry about that because I try to worry about the one single part of the job I can control: the writing of the book. If I do that well, I feel, good tidings generally will follow and readers will stick with me.

The nicest notes I've received from readers are those that tell me I've gotten them back into reading for entertainment. For me, there is no greater compliment.

I want to be a writer you can always depend on for a good read during your vacation, during your flight, during a time in your life when you want to forget the world around you.

After graduation, I moved to Los Angeles to do more theater, not realizing there is very little theater in L.A. It was a lucky mistake, though, because after just 2 1/2 months of waiting tables, my TV and film career really took off.

There's just so many great stories in the past that you can know a little bit about, but you can't know it all, and that's where imagination can work.

I was opposed to doing TV for a long time because I thought the quality of writing wasn't very strong, as opposed to film, but there's been a shift in term of the quality of scripts. HBO has attracted a tremendous amount of great writing talent.

It's the idea that anticipation is as scary as anything in a movie could be. People's imagination is the most effective tool in creating terror or dread.