 As critical acclaim and response has built up, every interview I give is a chance to puncture the myth I've created about my work and refine it. |
| I put on such a good show, the story is outrageous, and people don't want to hear that I'm basically a reasonable human being. As long as it continues to get me print, I'll continue to perform in an exuberant manner. |
| I haven't been to a movie in a year and a half. |
| I love thinking about American history, thinking about LA history. I love brooding on crime. |
| I would like to provoke ambiguous responses in my readers. |
| Anybody who doesn't know that politics is crime has got a few screws loose. |
| 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'm getting a wider circle of fans now. More women, more middle class people. |
| I am conservative by temperament. I disapprove of criminal activity. I am very solidly and markedly on the side of authority. The truth is I would rather err on the side of too much authority than too little. |
| Raymond Chandler once wrote that Dashiell Hammett gave murder back to the people who really committed it. |
| I was a WASP kid going to a high school that was 99 percent Jewish and I wanted attention and I wanted to make a spectacle of myself because I couldn't stand to be ignored. |
| As much as I transferred my mother to Elizabeth Shore of The Black Dahlia, as much as her dad mutated into an obsession with crime in general, well, I have thought about other things throughout the years. |
| My mother and I will continue on some level that I haven't determined yet. I think my mother's a great character, and I have to say that giving my mother to the world has to be the biggest thrill of my writing career. |
| I don't know anybody in the underworld. I make this stuff up. I don't know any criminals. |
| As a kid, I sensed history going on all around me, but the basic thrust of it didn't move me. |
| Rock and rollers can get you the youth buzz, and younger people are fanatical readers. |
| When I was a kid, Eisenhower had been President forever, and all of a sudden, everything in the world was all about Jack Kennedy. I was 12, interested in politics; my father was from Massachusetts, had an accent like Kennedy. |
| I am a writer. I could not afford to take 15 months off from my writing career to play detective. |
| The truth of the matter is, you lose a parent to murder when you're 10 years old, and in fact at the time of the murder you hate your lost parent, my mother in my case. |
| I'm clenched down, I'm locked in on it, which is my general approach to life. |
