I don't feel in any way obligated to remain current with the culture. I feel no social obligation whatsoever. I trust my morality in the narrow path I trek through the world as I work.

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.

Look up and hook up to a life of significance and don’t look down on yourself.

Your true personality is not the outer you but the inner you not the person you present to the world but the person you hide from the world

The sadness began later, in waves as crushing as the contractions had been,

He who contemplates the depths of Paris is seized with vertigo.Nothing is more fantastic. Nothing is more tragic.Nothing is more sublime.

The truth that could be extracted from words was such a fluctuating, relative truth.

Common fluency of speech in many men and most women is owing to a scarcity of matter.

Mystery such as is given of God is beyond the power of human penetration, yet not in opposition to it.

Being Dead means very light housekeeping

Without common sense, all thine efforts are in vain.

At the time my dog had a fungus on her chest that wouldn't heal and resisted treatment. I made an ointment with our product and it cleared up in two days. She lived to 17 years.