Arbor Day is not like other holidays. Each of those reposes on the past, while Arbor Day proposes for the future.

Each generation takes the earth as trustees. We ought to bequeath to posterity as many forests and orchards as we have exhausted and consumed.

The cultivation of trees is the cultivation of the good, the beautiful, and the ennobling in man, and for one, I wish to see it become universal.

I love the structural part of the writing process.

I simply love writing good stories, that's my passion.

I write what I'd like to read and just hope that, along the way, others might like to read them, too.

I'd pretty much given up hope of being published, so I just wrote the book I wanted to read.

In retrospect, it seems like everything in my life led to me becoming a writer. I just didn't realise it at the time.

People might think writing is a hard business, but it's nowhere near acting.

There's a market for mysteries for adults. That feeling of opening a book and delving inside and not coming out until you've closed the book.

Some say I'm an overnight success. Well, that was a very long night that lasted about 10 years. But while I do, of course, now feel the pressure having had books that have been very successful, I just know I have to concentrate on writing for myself. I can't worry about genres or markets or what might be commercial or not. That never works.