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

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.

You have to trust your body to take care of you.

To outlive one's child is a terrible thing, but to do so because your child has taken his or her life is horrible.

No one is perfect, and criticism is always welcome and expected.

One would think that plants belonging to the same genus would always produce identical or at least similar oils. But this is by no means so.

Practical storage pieces are great if you have a basement or a garage. But when you actually live with them day in and day out, they should be beautiful to look at.

We're sympathetic, but once you step on the field, football's football.

Fill the earth with your songs of gratitude.

Along with our many human propensities, we evolved a huge cerebral cortex with which we make decisions.

The philosopher ought never to try to avoid the duty of making up his mind.

You have to develop ways so that you can take up for yourself, and then you take up for someone else. And so sooner or later, you have enough courage to really stand up for the human race and say, 'I'm a representative.'

I guess Johnny Depp has a pretty good career. I love a lot of parts that actors have played, so I love pieces of their career, but it's pretty hard to look at an actor's whole career and go, 'That was awesome!' Usually it either ends on a crappy show or with no work at all.

I need wrong to get laughs. I need a normal world so that I can be abnormal, and that's my problem. Comedians need prejudice.

Writing about carrying the past on your back is a manifestation of my Irishness, because we go on and on and will for another two or three generations.

I try to do my absolute best for the people who come see me play.

If expectations are low, you can only impress people. But if expectations are there for you to be the leading guy, and you've been paid X amount of money, you're on a tightrope, and all of a sudden, you're looking down.

'Esquire Magazine' just gave me 'Father of the Year'. I'll put it right up there with my gold medal. I survived; that's why they gave it to me.

Give sorrow words. The grief that does not speak whispers the oer fraught heart and bids it break.

All I can say is, it's not very easy for a woman to be associated with The Beatles.

Life is not perfect, but your nails can be.

Look out for Number One. If you don't, no one else will.

I don't get a chance to be home much.