I learn things late-and only the hard way.

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.

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

The Grace of God and the human will are co-operant, but not on equal terms. Grace has the pre-eminence.

Oh, these vast, calm, measureless mountain days, days in whose light everything seems equally divine, opening a thousand windows to show us God.

It is a negative sort of achievement, she thinks, to have spent a life warding something off.

Bulnerable without strength is vulnerable, and being vulnerable means you can be victimized.

It looked like something the Hemlock needed, or a piece of equipment a plumber had left behind. It looked like none of your business.

Complexity excites the mind, and order rewards it. In the garden, one finds both, including vanishingly small orders too complex to spot, and orders so vast the mind struggles to embrace them.

There is always one thing to be grateful for - that one is one's self and not somebody else.

What will die with me when I die, what pathetic or fragile form will the world lose?

You don't reason with intellectuals. You shoot them.

Fatigue seems to be a factor in this accident.