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

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.

I don't see much difference between living and working. I think living is a part of my work. People often say, 'How can you work so much?' I don't think about it as work. I think of it as a way to live.

Begin now to be what you will be hereafter.

Our brains are continuing to evolve, and perhaps a few tens of thousands of years from now, our descendants will walk around with five pound brains, allowing them insights that we can't imagine.

People in America, when listening to radio, like to lean forward. People in Britain like to lean back.

That is what chronic illness is a disconnect between what our souls can do and what our bodies can do.

There are many who would much prefer that the word 'climate' never be mentioned and that the issue be eliminated from our national conversation.

I grew up in a small town in northeastern Indiana. I had an all-American childhood. And I grew up as an optimist.

My instinct is to write under the cloak of an opaque historical setting.

All of my tales are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and emotions have no validity or significance in the cosmos-at-large.

I'm a small dog guy. I don't want to be pattin' with the big Rottweiler or Great Dane. I like those little guys that jump on your lap and don't knock you over when they do.

I think it is important for every actress to be able to feel whatever garment she has on because, we as women, we know when we look good. We know when we feel good.

You know I used to listen to music a lot more.

I've managed to convince my wife that somewhere in the Bible it says, 'Man cannot have too many shotguns and fishing poles.'

Frustration is commonly the difference between what you would like to be and what you are willing to sacrifice to become what you would like to be.

I'd rather just be the girl who likes to eat a lot of food.

We have new tools that can give the audience a sense of not only being there, which is the key element in an IMAX film, but also seeing things in a way that they won't see on television or in feature films.

Ever since I was a child, I've just had this sense that I'm connected to the spiritual world. I thought everyone else felt the same way. I can hear voices - not all the time - but when I'm with certain people, it sometimes comes through.

We've never been a religious band, but the media wants us to be.

I hope that the mistakes made and suffering imposed upon Japanese Americans nearly 60 years ago will not be repeated against Arab Americans whose loyalties are now being called into question.

I am a victim of introspection.