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.

I'm one of the narrative-push people. I don't outline, I don't plan ahead. So I'm my first reader, telling myself the story as I'm going along. Since I haven't designed it ahead of time, each day I have to be sure that the footing is solid before I make the next step. I think you could be more intricate if you work it out ahead of time.

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.

I loved it, but social reality impeded. Now I wander in here at 9 in the morning or so, and come back for a while in the afternoon. I am a very lenient boss.

I was writing everything. I grew up in Albany, New York, and I was never any farther west than Syracuse, and I wrote Westerns. I wrote tiny little slices of life, sent them off to The Sewanee Review, and they always sent them back. For the first 10 years I was published, I'd say, "I'm a writer disguised as a mystery writer." But then I look back, and well, maybe I'm a mystery writer. You tend to go where you're liked, so when the mysteries were being published, I did more of them.

What advice I would give to anybody about anything. Life is a slow-motion avalanche, and none of us are steering." (When asked in an interview about what question he's tired of being asked.)

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.