I am a master of fiction. I am also the greatest crime novelist who ever lived. I am to the crime novel in specific what Tolstoy is to the Russian novel and what Beethoven is to music.

Anybody who doesn't know that politics is crime has got a few screws loose.

I would like to provoke ambiguous responses in my readers.

Tell me anything. Tell me everything. Revoke our time apart. Love me fierce in danger.

L.A.: Come on vacation, go home on probation.

Cats gotta scratch. Dogs gotta bite. I gotta write.

I am a writer. I could not afford to take 15 months off from my writing career to play detective.

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.

I've been tremendously moved by a bunch of odd books. Ross McDonald is very important to me. I love the Lew Archer books.

I love thinking about American history, thinking about LA history. I love brooding on crime.

I learn things late-and only the hard way.

Blood can help make family, but family often transcends blood.

Troubles always seemed more severe after the sun went down. Even irrational worries and fears could seem perfectly logical at midnight.

You don't have to be a genius or a visionary or even a college graduate to be successful. You just need a framework and a dream.

The love of property and consciousness of right and wrong have conflicting places in our organization, which often makes a man's course seem crooked, his conduct a riddle.

Love finds an altar for forbidden fires.

A hair shirt does not always render those chaste who wear it.

If you're going to get engaged make sure you've talked to your partner about life together in the years to come.

I wish I'd known that one day the geek would inherit the Earth.

It is one thing to say Jesus is all you want; until He is all you have and you discover He is all you ever needed.

No more things should be presumed to exist than are absolutely necessary.