My wife says in Richard Stark's world, the honest citizens are goofy. Okay, they are. I don't know if it's good or bad, but because he's outside his own world, it sort of freed up the environment around him to be a little more looser and goofier.

When the guy with asthma finally came in from the fire escape, Parker rabbit-punched him and took his gun away.

If Chester had a failing, it was that he believed people were what they thought they were.

When the phone rang, Parker was in the garage, killing a man.

A grifter's got an irresistible urge to be the guy who's wise. There's nothin' to whipping a fool. Hell, fools are made to be whipped. But to take another pro. Even your partner, who knows you and has his eye on you. That's a score! No matter what happens.

Nothing about it interested me. Or about anything else, except making up stories. If literacy weren't so nearly universal, God knows what I'd be. A drain on the State, I shouldn't wonder.

There are a couple of writers I admired who were very good at giving the character's emotion without stating what that emotion was. Not saying "He was feeling tense," instead saying, "His hand squeezed harder on the chair arm," as if staying outside the guy. I wanted to try doing that. I wanted to have a really emotional story in which the characters' emotions are never straight - out told to you, but you get it.