Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I have a very intense marriage.
Some people don’t respond to civility.
I learn things late-and only the hard way.
L.A.: Come on vacation, go home on probation.
And you love to read, you love to escape, right?
Cats gotta scratch. Dogs gotta bite. I gotta write.
It was easy not to think of my future; I didn't have one.
I would like to provoke ambiguous responses in my readers.
If I wanted to make money I would have written another novel.
I almost had an intransigent mental spirit. I always wanted things.
There's none with me, although you've seen me before - I'm outrageous.
Dead people belong to the live people who claim them most obsessively.
Anybody who doesn't know that politics is crime has got a few screws loose.
I needed to address that I've had some profound moral shifts in my own life.
I'm getting a wider circle of fans now. More women, more middle class people.
I want to see these bad, bad, bad, bad men come to grips with their humanity.
I'm clenched down, I'm locked in on it, which is my general approach to life.
We do. Or re-create the ones we have, and project. My whole life is projection.
It's all sex for me. Politics is sex. Race is sex. It's the novel. It's the novel!
I wanted things. Whatever it cost and whatever it took, I would do it. And that's it.
Closure is a preposterous concept worthy of the worst aspects of American daytime TV.
How did I change my life? I wanted things. I wanted women and I wanted to write books.
Rock and rollers can get you the youth buzz, and younger people are fanatical readers.
Tell me anything. Tell me everything. Revoke our time apart. Love me fierce in danger.
I think I'm out of crime fiction now, and I think the dividing line is American Tabloid.
I don't know anybody in the underworld. I make this stuff up. I don't know any criminals.
To me, there's nothing on earth other than women. It's why I get out of bed every morning.
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.
As a kid, I sensed history going on all around me, but the basic thrust of it didn't move me.
I'm trying to be less bombastic. I love my books. I think I've done things nobody else has done.
I am a writer. I could not afford to take 15 months off from my writing career to play detective.
Joe Wambaugh's a friend. I know him only casually, but I like him a lot. I think he likes my books.
I begin by assembling notes on characters. Large swaths of the plot become clear to me as I do this.
Raymond Chandler once wrote that Dashiell Hammett gave murder back to the people who really committed it.
[Raymond] Chandler, I reread him, and there's a lot of bad writing there. I don't think he knew much about people.
I've created a narrative of the world. I live in the world - tenuously, most times. I've avoided the digital world.
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.
I've been tremendously moved by a bunch of odd books. Ross McDonald is very important to me. I love the Lew Archer books.
All I want to do is make serious movies that explore social issues and turn a profit, and slip the schnitzel to Jane DePugh.
I got a woman I'm loyal to above all things, above my career. She's profound to me. I'm quiet. I live in Kansas City. I work.
You get up in the morning because you might meet a woman. And if you stay at home by yourself, alone, you will not meet a woman.
I don't think I will write anything that could be even remotely considered a genre novel from this point on. I think I've graduated.
I'm grateful for the life I have. I lived bad for many years, and I've got a great life now. I've got the kind of life people only dream about.
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.
"War gives men a plain-and-simple something to do ... Women write diaries in the hope that their words will beckon fate." It's a romantic manifesto.
Sometimes I'll leave the house and go to a delicatessen down the street from me - it's been there a million years - just because I can look at people.
Some men get the world, some men get ex-hookers and a trip to Arizona. You're in with the former, but my God I don't envy the blood on your conscience.
Our shared world is humanly unquantifiable and ideologically confused. Which one of them is capable of implementing the most recognizable harm or good?
I wanted to portray a newly democratized, enclosed society. I wanted to show how extraordinarily fluid people are in their embrace of other human beings.