As much as I transferred my mother to Elizabeth Shore of The Black Dahlia, as much as her dad mutated into an obsession with crime in general, well, I have thought about other things throughout the years.

I'm getting a wider circle of fans now. More women, more middle class people.

Rock and rollers can get you the youth buzz, and younger people are fanatical readers.

I am a writer. I could not afford to take 15 months off from my writing career to play detective.

I don't know anybody in the underworld. I make this stuff up. I don't know any criminals.

I put on such a good show, the story is outrageous, and people don't want to hear that I'm basically a reasonable human being. As long as it continues to get me print, I'll continue to perform in an exuberant manner.

I have a very intense marriage.

I've been tremendously moved by a bunch of odd books. Ross McDonald is very important to me. I love the Lew Archer books.

Raymond Chandler once wrote that Dashiell Hammett gave murder back to the people who really committed it.

As much as I transferred my mother to Elizabeth Shore of The Black Dahlia, as much as her dad mutated into an obsession with crime in general, well, I have thought about other things throughout the years.

Every one of my books is written from the viewpoint of cops, with the exception of my book Killer on the Road, which is written from the viewpoint of a serial killer.

My mother and I will continue on some level that I haven't determined yet. I think my mother's a great character, and I have to say that giving my mother to the world has to be the biggest thrill of my writing career.

I'm clenched down, I'm locked in on it, which is my general approach to life.

Noir is dead for me because historically, I think it's a simple view. I've taken it as far as it can go. I think I've expanded on it a great deal, taken it further than any other American novelist.

Anybody who doesn't know that politics is crime has got a few screws loose.

I am conservative by temperament. I disapprove of criminal activity. I am very solidly and markedly on the side of authority. The truth is I would rather err on the side of too much authority than too little.

I was a WASP kid going to a high school that was 99 percent Jewish and I wanted attention and I wanted to make a spectacle of myself because I couldn't stand to be ignored.

As a kid, I sensed history going on all around me, but the basic thrust of it didn't move me.

I haven't been to a movie in a year and a half.

I like to be alone so I can write. But focus can hurt you. I don't want to be some stress casualty in early middle age.

As critical acclaim and response has built up, every interview I give is a chance to puncture the myth I've created about my work and refine it.

I would like to provoke ambiguous responses in my readers.

I want to see these bad, bad, bad, bad men come to grips with their humanity.

When I was a kid, Eisenhower had been President forever, and all of a sudden, everything in the world was all about Jack Kennedy. I was 12, interested in politics; my father was from Massachusetts, had an accent like Kennedy.

I am the most well-adjusted human being I know. I started out this investigation as a very happy man with a great career. I've got the life people dream about: I am rich, I am famous, I've got a fabulous marriage to an absolutely, spell-bindingly brilliant woman.

The truth of the matter is, you lose a parent to murder when you're 10 years old, and in fact at the time of the murder you hate your lost parent, my mother in my case.

I love thinking about American history, thinking about LA history. I love brooding on crime.

I think the great unspoken theme in noir fiction is male self-pity. It pervades noir movies.

What becomes a crime deserving capital punishment when the tables are turned is a matter of small moment when the negro woman is the accusing party.

The seasons come up undisturbed by crime and war.

Examples one finds in the philosophical literature are somebody who's seen the trial of a child of theirs, where they're being proved guilty of some crime that would drive the parent into a depression, maybe a suicidal depression.

He has committed the crime who profits by it.

Dullness is the only crime for which an editor ought to be hung.

Success in crime always invites to worse deeds.

Crime, to the man of the forties, was an alien monstrous terror.

Rather let the crime of the guilty go unpunished than condemn the innocent.

I will never have a drink and get behind the wheel of a car. It's not illegal to drink and drive, but there becomes a certain point where it does become a crime.

I think there's a lot of naivete and hubris within our mix of personalities. That's probably our worst crime. I keep wondering what a "mature" record means.

The world of crime is a last refuge of the authentic, uncorrupted, spontaneous event.

A shocking crime was committed on the unscrupulous initiative of few individuals, with the blessing of more, and amid the passive acquiescence of all.

The infectiousness of crime is like that of the plague.

I didn't break into comics to write fairytales or crime comics.

Powerful states can maintain themselves only by crime, little states are virtuous only by weakness.

One crime has to be concealed by another.

We got into all the trouble you could ever imagine. We figured that if the Jones boys and all the gangsters ran Chicago, we had our own territory now. All the stores, all the crime, we were in charge of everything, my stepbrother and my brother.

Next to the love of God, the love of country is the best preventive of crime.

The fact that a player is very short of time is, to my mind, as little to be considered an excuse as, for instance, the statement of the law-breaker that he was drunk at the time he committed the crime.

We are not supposed to go out and kill all those we suspect to have committed a crime.

The worst crime is faking it.