I don't want to recover from writing this book [The Onion]. I feel very poised. I feel like I'm with my mother for the first time ever. I feel like I've confronted her, and the confrontation goes on.

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.

Common sense will nearly always stand you in better stead than a slavish adherence to the conventions.

Men will not save women for nothing, but themselves. Women have to save themselves.

On every journey, we encountered beautiful souls.

Ordinary persons, he said, smiling, found no differences between men. The artist found them all.

I play in a band, I write songs, I sing, you know, perform on stage.

Love without risk is an impossibility, like war without death.

We’ve died so many times now that we can only wonder why we still care.

We were not as rich as the Rockefellers or Mellons, but we were rich enough to know how rich they were.

It was never my goal to be an actor.

When you write a novel you have to live with the characters for a long time. So I prefer short stories. I never wrote anything more than 250 pages.