Noir is dead for me because historically, I think it's a simple view. I've taken it as far as it can go. I think I've expanded on it a great deal, taken it further than any other American novelist.

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.

It dawned on me that no person is as poetically homesick as someone who has come to New York for the first time and glimpsed a small vestige of her home state.

Ironically enough, the only people who can hold up indefinitely under the stress of modern war are psychotics. Individual insanity is immune to the consequences of collective insanity.

Everybody likes to indulge in a bit of ice-cream and junk food. If you want to be a top player you've got to be sensible in terms of what you eat.

I think, because I'm an artist, part of my job is to be a barometer, an antenna. It's in the air and it resonates with a lot of people to lighten up.

[Andre] Gide can say it to me: it is a writer's morality only addressed to a few privileged people. For that reason it no longer interests me.

I felt like the universe was tapping me on the shoulder saying, "You're the guy who has to tell this story because nobody else is."

When you think about the passion that's involved wth Jamaican culture, it's like, they're not sitting around waiting for things to get all pretty: they want it raw and dutty.

But my favorite part in my body are my dark circles. They define me. They reveal my melancholy.

Meekness, the subtraction of self, reduces the multiplication of words.

When you connect to your source, you can create anything you'd like to have in your life.