I'm trying to be less bombastic. I love my books. I think I've done things nobody else has done.

I don't know anybody in the underworld. I make this stuff up. I don't know any criminals.

I am conservative by temperament. I disapprove of criminal activity. I am very solidly and markedly on the side of authority. The truth is I would rather err on the side of too much authority than too little.

If I wanted to make money I would have written another novel.

Tell me anything. Tell me everything. Revoke our time apart. Love me fierce in danger.

When I look at Perfidia, I think, "That's a Pulitzer Prize winner. That's a National Book Award winner." It's not going to get it. It's going to be shelved in crime and it's just the way it is. I've done something that no one else has ever done; I've started out as a mystery writer, a police writer, and a crime writer, and I became something entirely different.

Raymond Chandler once wrote that Dashiell Hammett gave murder back to the people who really committed it.