The only thing I learned from the architecture is keep the bathroom and the kitchen near each other, so you don't have to run pipes all over the place.

I don't think I ever have trouble with writer's block. It's different when you make it up as you go - that means you're going to get stuck. I wouldn't call it writer's block, I'd say, "I don't know where the hell this story is going."

What did Jesus Christ say to the Teamsters? 'Do nothing till I get back.

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.

In a funny way, the stories keep themselves alive by emerging from one another. I like that.

Parker wasn't supposed to be a series. He was supposed to be one book, and if he was only going to be in one book, I didn't worry about it. And then an editor at Pocket Books said "Write more books about him." So I didn't go back at that point and give him a first name. If I'd known he would've been a series, I would've done two things differently. First, I would've given him a first name because that means for 27 books, I've had to find some other way to say, "Parker parked the car."

If your subject is crime, then you know at least that you're going to have a real story. If your subject is the maturing of a college boy, you may never stumble across a story while you're telling that. But if your story is a college boy dead in his dorm room, you know there's a story in there, someplace.