'All Our Yesterdays' was unquestionably the best work I have ever done. And the reading public stayed away in droves.

Send it to someone who can publish it. And if they won't publish it, send it to someone else who can publish it! And keep sending it! Of course, if no one will publish it, at that point you might want to think about doing something other than writing.

They give me the money, I give them the book. Having input into the adaptation would be kind of like selling a house and coming back three years later and saying, 'Paint it this color!'

She found me intolerable. But she got to know me, and I wore her down.

I really don't know what I am going to do in terms of what a book is going to be about until I actually start writing it!

Would you care to publish this? Sincerely, Robert B. Parker.

College had little effect on me. I'd have been the same writer if I'd gone to MIT, except I'd have flunked out sooner.

With so much at stake maybe I'll just leave now.

I had achieved the most important things in my life when I married Joan and had the sons. Given the choice between Joan and the boys, and being a writer, I world give up being a writer without a blink.

I got thrown out of school several weeks in my senior year being caught in the girls' dorm. This was 1954, friends. The girls' dorm was off limits. Even to girls, I think.

I have reached the point where I know that as long as I sit down to write, the ideas will come. What they will be, I don't know.

I didn't have to say it. I just had to write it. It was painful enough.

Sure, I have advice for people starting to write. Don't. I don't need the competition.

Very few of my books are about who stole the Maltese Falcon.

If you want to write, write it. That's the first rule. And send it in, and send it in to someone who can publish it or get it published. Don't send it to me. Don't show it to your spouse, or your significant other, or your parents, or somebody. They're not going to publish it.

I think at this stage in my life I have learned that there are any number of things that men will never know, and can never hope to know, about women.

I write five pages a day. If you would read five pages a day, we'd stay right even.

For David Parker and Daniel Parker, with the respect and admiration of their father, who grew up with them.

My older son who is, I think, here tonight, is forty-one years old. Which is odd because so am I.

I think finally good writing gets out there, and people like it, and bad writing doesn't. Well, no. Bad writing does get out there 'cause some people like it.

Joan organizes our social life, and on weekends I follow her around.

Well, you give me too much credit for foresight and planning. I haven't got a clue what the hell I'm doing.

'All Our Yesterdays' was unquestionably the best work I have ever done. And the reading public stayed away in droves.

Teaching is too strong a word for whatever it was I did at Northeastern University.

It's tempting to say the Ph.D. didn't have an effect, but it's not so. I think whatever resonance I may be able to achieve is in part simply from the amount of reading and learning that I acquired along the way.

I was on the Oprah Winfrey Show once. It was a really slow news day for Oprah, and there were several of us on 'cause none of us was sufficiently interesting by his or herself.

It was not just that Ross Macdonald taught us how to write; he did something much more, he taught us how to read, and how to think about life, and maybe, in some small, but mattering way, how to live.

This is not a screenplay. I don't do twenty drafts. I'm not going to show this to you until it's published or accepted for publication. You can make whatever suggestions you want, but I probably will ignore them entirely.

There can never be any substitute for your own palate nor any better education than tasting the wine yourself.

Roosevelt's magic lay in one facet of his personality: He knew how to take the risk. No other man in public life I knew could so readily take the challenge of the new.

When producers want to know what the public wants, they graph it as curves. When they want to tell the public what to get, they say it in curves.

Public discussions are part of what it takes to make changes in the trillions of graphics published each year.

I can assure you, public service is a stimulating, proud and lively enterprise. It is not just a way of life, it is a way to live fully.

I give everything I have to give on the screen. I feel I don't owe the public anything else.

Public opinion polls are rather like children in a garden, digging things up all the time to see how they're growing.

My art became very public.

Depending on what day of the week it is and what time of the month it is, I'm a good friend or not a good friend. I'm more or less a good mom or not a good mom, more or less a good mate or not a good mate. That's just life, whether or not you're public.

Well, I think that those of us in public life that are trying to do a good job, and that are faced with this popular new game that the media has of being critical of everything that anybody in public office does probably are thin-skinned.

The greatest public health threat for many American women is the men they live with.

Like religion, politics, and family planning, cereal is not a topic to be brought up in public. It's too controversial.

Yesterday in this country we had people die of hunger and malnutrition. In some parts of this country, the infant mortality rate rivals that of sub-Saharan Africa. We have a public education system that ranks below that of almost any other Western nation.

Don't try to be somebody you're not because it doesn't work. If you try to be this perfect person or perfect persona of what you think that somebody should be when they're involved in public office, it's just not going to work. Just be yourself, stay true to your core values, and really just stay abreast of the issues.

Alabama citizens, like the vast majority of Americans, respect and value the meaning of decency, and appreciate public institutions that reflect the common values of our society.

It was he who impressed, time and again, the necessity of singing as nature intended, and - I remember - he constantly warned, don't let the public know that you work. So I went slowly. I never forced the voice.

In the coming days, I know there will be some reflecting on my time as mayor. Many of you will search to find what's behind my decision. It's simple. I have always believed that every person, especially public officials, must understand when it is time to move on. For me, that time is now.

All of us who are convinced that our military needs all the support the government and public will provide are pleased that he will have his chance to do just that.

There was a time when I was wondering about this business of going public, so I visited about a half-dozen companies in the Boston area, all of them formed by MIT faculty and all had gone public.

He was a fantastic player, but the thing that impressed me most about Paul was his manner off the pitch. He was always very humble about his achievements and had a lot of time for the paying public and people in general.

The game has kept faith with the public, maintaining its old admission price for nearly thirty years while other forms of entertainment have doubled and tripled in price. And it will probably never change.