I know you shouldn't spit in your own soup but I think most crime writing is like TV and doesn't make enormous demands on one's intellect.

I just go to lunch. And I never know when something is going into the file and something is not.

I have always had a particular antagonism for the military.

I never know what's going to happen in a novel. I don't have a plan or an outline.

And off in the far distance, the gold on the wings of the angel atop the bell tower of San Marco flashed in the sun, bathing the entire city in its glistening benediction.

Venetians feel affection and loyalty to their city, rather than to the Italian state.

This is a fallen world. People lie, the truth gets distorted, and that's the way it is. What's for dinner ?

All through graduate school, instead of having a television I read murder mysteries: Hammett, Chandler, Ruth Rendell, P. D. James.

Oh, so seldom does fate cast our enemy into our hands, to do with as we will

And I don't want to live anywhere where I am famous. It makes me very, very uncomfortable, because it conveys an advantage over people, and I don't like that.

I never wanted to be rich or successful or famous. I just wanted to be happy and have fun.

LOVE the hideous in order to find the sublime core of it.

[On men:] I'm torn between wanting to have one and wanting to be one.

I can keep my head together in a crisis.

This is my 1963 Ford. It was the only car I could A-Ford.

There are no accidents so unlucky but the prudent may draw some advantage from them.

My anxious recollections, my sympathetic feeling, and my best wishes are irresistibly excited whensoever, in any country, I see an oppressed nation unfurl the banners of freedom.

It's very disappointing... Anything that harms the integrity of the game is terrible. We always thought we were immune to drugs in baseball, but we know that's not true anymore.

What do you want from me?" he asks. What I want from every person in my life, I want to tell him. More.

The problem is not what we are doing badly, it is because we are not doing things well.

You [should] persist even though there are some short-term stresses and even though there is some uncertainty, because it's the right thing to do.