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.

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.

What use is of an eye to be open if it's not there to see! Shouldn't it rather be gauged or closed for it deceives?

One day I had nothing but my childhood to defend myself……….

And I was having too much fun to stop now.

A wife is the joy of a man's heart.

It has been said that though God cannot alter the past historians can - it is perhaps because they can be useful to Him in this respect that He tolerates their existence.

We cannot tell what may happen to us in the strange medley of life. But we can decide what happens in us - how we take it what we do with it - and that is what really counts in the end.

Nothing in life that’s worth anything is easy.

A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

Men scanning the surface count the wicked happy; they see not the frightful dreams that crowd a bad man's pillow.

Nations are born in the hearts of poets, they prosper and die in the hands of politicians.