Rock and rollers can get you the youth buzz, and younger people are fanatical readers.

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.

Love is not about others; love is a practice of self-mastery.

"Law professors were never like economics professors," a Harvard Law professor told me. "If you disagreed with someone, you didn't call him a fool."

History is nothing except monsters or victims. Or witnesses.

The head does not know how to play the part of the heart for long.

Happy men are grave. They carry their happiness cautiously, as they would a glass filled to the brim which the slightest movement could cause to spill over, or break.

Nirvana was pop. You can have distorted guitars and people say it's alternative, but you can't break out of pop music's constructs and still get extensive radio play and media coverage.

I don’t know whether to feel flattered or hunted.

Even in Kyoto/Hearing the cuckoo's cry/I long for Kyoto

I love challenging myself, doing different things and exploring different areas that I haven't been to or gone to before. That's what I love about acting, and that's what I love about film.

So perhaps the real secret to style is filling yourself to the absolute brim with engagement. Loving not wisely, but too well and all that.