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

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.

How strange it is that murder has the sanction of law in one and only one of the human relationships, and that is the most important of all, that of nation to nation.

In the First World War, there was the sudden passion of nationalism, and the killing took place because of these emotions. But the Soviet case is different, because you had systematic murder, like the Holocaust.

There seems to be this sense among even well-meaning Americans that Africa is this black hole of murder and mutilation that can never be fixed, no matter what aid is brought in.

And, quite frankly, I fully expected to be charged with murder, because they weren't charging anybody. I did it in terms of, I felt like I was throwing down the gauntlet saying look, this is what happened. There's a family out there that needed to know what happened.

If once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he comes next to drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination.

It seems that whatever we do is somehow beyond reproach - murder, rape, drunk driving - as long as we go on a TV show and apologize.

Under pressure, people admit to murder, setting fire to the village church or robbing a bank, but never to being bores.

Torture is banned but in two-thirds of the world's countries it is still being committed in secret. Too many governments still allow wrongful imprisonment, murder or "disappearance" to be carried out by their officials with impunity.

Anybody who's been through a divorce will tell you that at one point. they've thought murder. The line between thinking murder and doing murder isn't that major.

Probably the toughest time in anyone's life is when you have to murder a loved one because they're the devil.

Those children who are beaten will in turn give beatings, those who are intimidated will be intimidating, those who are humiliated will impose humiliation, and those whose souls are murdered will murder.

Certainly, the murder of civilians for political statement did not just begin on September 11, 2001.

The word survivor suggests someone who has emerged alive from a plane crash or a natural disaster. But the word can also refer to the loved ones of murder victims, and this was the sense in which it was used at a four-day conference in early June at Boston College.

The facts of a person's life will, like murder, come out.

The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings, and that these individual beings are condemned by the monstrous conventions of politics to murder or be murdered in quarrels not their own.

One of the hardest things to believe is that anyone will abandon the effort to escape a charge of murder. It is extremely important to suspend disbelief on that. If you don't, the story is spoiled.

It is the privilege of those who fear love to murder those who do not fear it!

It's true that Blake was emotionally disturbed - always has been - but he doesn't have murder in his heart. If he was going to do any damage to anything or anyone, it would be to himself.

Murder is born of love, and love attains the greatest intensity in murder.

Twilight is about getting older and relationships - not about a murder mystery. It's about love when you reach a certain age; nothing is in primary colors.

Is it hard for the reader to believe that suicides are sometimes committed to forestall the committing of murder? There is no doubt of it. Nor is there any doubt that murder is sometimes committed to avert suicide.