I make a note, set it aside, and hope it makes sense when the time comes to look at it again.

The fictioneer labors under the constraint of plausibility; his inventions must stay within the capacity of the audience to accept and believe. God, of course, working with facts, faces no limitation.

The many magazines, ranging from pulp to slick, that used to serve as both farm teams for writers and lures to readers, with hundreds of short stories every month, don't exist. Most of the doors for new people have been sealed.

Nobody gets everything in this life. You decide your priorities and you make your choices. I'd decided long ago that any cake I had would be eaten.

The other thing that I got back then - the Parker novels have never had much of anything to do with race. There have been a few black characters here and there, but the first batch of books back then, I got a lot of letters from urban black guys in their 20s, 30s, 40s. What were they seeing that they were reacting to? And I think I finally figured it out - at that time, they were guys who felt very excluded from society, that they had been rejected by the greater American world.

I make a note, set it aside, and hope it makes sense when the time comes to look at it again.

In the first batch of readers, back in the '60s and '70s, the criminal class was still literate, so I would get letters from people in prison; they thought that I was somebody whom they could shop-talk with, and they would tell me very funny stories. I got a lot of those. Guys who were going to wind up doing 10 to 15 for bank robbery, yes, were reading my books.