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

Writing is flat, so if you only have part of one eye working, you still can do the job. It's just that you sit there and you're angry, which doesn't help.

It's so difficult, particularly with an antisocial character. It's much easier if he's already a blank page, but once you've written on him, it's hard to keep him that stripped down.

In the most basic way, writers are defined not by the stories they tell, or their politics, or their gender, or their race, but by the words they use. Writing begins with language, and it is in that initial choosing, as one sifts through the wayward lushness of our wonderful mongrel English, that choice of vocabulary and grammar and tone, the selection on the palette, that determines who's sitting at that desk. Language creates the writer's attitude toward the particular story he's decided to tell.

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.

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

Once he became a series character, I made the conscious choice that he would never act like a series character, never wink at the reader, never pull his punches. Better for him, better for me.