Sex and violence … are the two great engines of the world.

There’s an old saying,” Buck said. “A hundred things can go wrong in a holdup, and if you can think of fifty of them you’re a damn genius.

If the devil ever raised a garden, the Everglades was it.

The family landed in the Western Hemisphere in the person of Roger Blake Wolfe, who arrived with a price on his head.

The notion that we’ve made vast moral progress and are now a less violent species is belied by our awesome powers of destruction, our military might, police forces as well-armed as soldiers. Without the threat...

The moon grew plump and pale as a peeled apple, waned into the passing nights, then showed itself again as a thin silver crescent in the twilit western sky. The shed of leaves became a...

The only things you can ever truly own cannot be bought with money.

He finally comprehended that the sole impossibility regarding human sorrow is to arrive at some unsurpassable limit to it.

They loved the sea. They taught themselves to sail, to navigate and read the weather. Without their mother’s knowledge and long before she thought them old enough to sail outside the harbor, they were piloting...

Men tend to remember the best things about the women they’ve loved and to forget the worst, which is why so many men make the same mistakes with women again and again. Women tend to...

Just because it’s a world of thieves out there don’t mean there ain’t no rules to it.

One of the greatest of human follies is that we think we know ourselves so well, that we know how we would act under any conditions, that we would under any circumstance ‘do the right...

When you make a deal you stick to it. Rock-hard rule. You don’t renege, you don’t sell out. You hold up your end and expect the other party to do the same. If the other...

Write about what you know,” isn’t limited to what you have personally experienced. Vicarious experience is also a great part of what you know. Read a lot of history and it becomes part of your...

It was my grandmother who first told me that a woman marries a man in the belief that he’ll change but he doesn’t — and a man marries a woman in the belief that she...

Some of us are always in the borderlands no matter where we might be on the map.

The vastness of the desert frightened her. Everything looked too far away, even the couldless sky. There was nowhere you could hide in such emptiness.

History is a record of human nature in action.

The greatest tragedy that can befall a man is never to know who he really is.

He would know a number of grown women in his life who did not possess even a small portion of the grace his middle sister owned at the age of fourteen.

A man who can laugh at himself is truly blessed, for he will never lack for amusement.

Pride has traditionally been regarded as the foremost of the Seven Deadly Sins, but it has rather obviously been overtaken by Greed.

You do not tell people to go fuck themselves and then later when you’re in trouble ask them to help you.

Every single time it was grand. I loved the moment when you announce the stickup and everything suddenly goes brighter and sharper and the world seems to spin faster. You show them the gun and...

I mean to tell you, the Law’s notion of justice is more cold-blooded than any outlaw I ever knew. And I mean ‘outlaw,’ not criminal. ‘Criminal’ doesn’t distinguish between guys like men and the guys...