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.

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.

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.

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

There is no one as intolerant as an open minded liberal.

When wisdom gives way to whimsy and ethics fall to excitement, it is highly likely that the ground beneath me will ‘give way’ and it is I who will ‘fall.

He that drinks his cider alone, let him catch his horse alone.

Satan wants to cripple me and then blame me for limping.

If I knocked and waited at every door, who knows what I might miss?

Anything on paper is obsolete!

There is no tomorrow. There is only a planet turning on its axis, and a creature given to optimistic fancies.

Insight comes at a moment of transition between work and relaxation.

Moral capitalism is possible; if not, its strictures are only a kind of misleading vanity, the rhetoric of a secular piety.

The process of reclaiming the self is one of reconciliation with meaning.