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

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

I learn things late-and only the hard way.

Our shared world is humanly unquantifiable and ideologically confused. Which one of them is capable of implementing the most recognizable harm or good?

Caring a tree is caring of your soul.

Enable every woman who can work to take her place on the labour front, under the principle of equal pay for equal work.

Trust not yourself, but your defects to know, make use of every friend and every foe.

I and me are always too deeply in conversation.

If hard work were such a wonderful thing, surely the rich would have kept it all to themselves.

I know it sounds very cliché and not very exciting, but if I'm outdoors - in the wild or the ocean or the forest - it inspires me.

Majorities and minorities cannot rightfully be taken at all into account in deciding questions of justice.

It's me, it's my habit to perform live onstage every four, five years. In Italy, it's my habit.

Don't spread patriotism too thin.