The tough thing about writing is you go into a room alone, you close the door and you do your work.

I don't make myself work. It's just the thing I want to do. To be completely alone in a room, to know that there'll be no interruptions and I've got eight hours is exactly what I want -- yeah, just paradise.

Not long ago I made a list of Doc Ford books I would like to do, and I came up with 11 pretty easily. I like to let the characters go their own ways and see what happens. I find them fascinating.

The written word is the only anchor we have in life. How extraordinary would it be if we had even three or four paragraphs written honestly about their lives by our ancestors?

Never to lie is to have no lock on your door, you are never wholly alone.

The water is alive. It is alive. If we could get a mask and fins and drop down off these docks, we'd see snook and redfish and probably goliath grouper. And it's an amazing world unto itself and a very thin demarcation between one world and the other. You know, the distance of the water surface.