Best-selling, award-winning crime novelist Lawrence Block answers our 12 Questions:

1. How do you think people see you?
Through a glass, darkly.

2. How would you like to be seen?
From a great distance.

3. What makes you laugh?
Wit.

4. What makes you cry?
Good TV.

5. What keeps you together?
African bird pepper.

6. What are the signs that you are going “off”?
You can never see it coming.

7. What’s your biggest fear?
That it’ll all turn out to be my fault.

8. What’s your biggest regret?
All the roads not taken.

9. What’s the most useful thing you’ve learned?
Very few things matter and nothing matters very much.

10. What’s your idea of serenity?
Actually believing #9.

11. Who is in your inner circle?
It’s more of an ellipse.

12. What’s the secret of your success?
Pigheaded perseverance.