I would like to provoke ambiguous responses in my readers.

She quoted a dead playwright and called me a bullet with nothing but a future. She understood my lack of self-pity. She knew why I despised everything that might restrict my forward momentum. She knew that bullets have no conscience. They speed past things and miss their marks as often as they hit them.

Cats gotta scratch. Dogs gotta bite. I gotta write.

The 250-page outline for American Tabloid. The books are so dense. They're so complex, you cannot write like I write off the top of your head. It's the combination of that meticulousness and the power of the prose and, I think, the depth of the characterizations and the risks that I've taken with language that give the books their clout. And that's where I get pissed off at a lot of my younger readers.

I'd never been interested in the Kennedy assassination until '88, when I read Libra. And from that point, I went out and bought the existing Kennedy theory books, most of which are outlandish. But what DeLillo posits - some rogue CIA guys - is the most dramatically sound, plausible explanation for it.

[Raymond] Chandler, I reread him, and there's a lot of bad writing there. I don't think he knew much about people.

As much as I transferred my mother to Elizabeth Shore of The Black Dahlia, as much as her dad mutated into an obsession with crime in general, well, I have thought about other things throughout the years.