It's all sex for me. Politics is sex. Race is sex. It's the novel. It's the novel!

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.

I think the great unspoken theme in noir fiction is male self-pity. It pervades noir movies.

The novel is final form; it's the ultimate individual final form. Television and motion pictures never get there. You'd be fabulous to think that something you write is even going to be filmed. I give it the best shot of which I'm capable. But it's more a payday for me. And if I didn't have alimony and the full-time assistant.

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

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

I almost had an intransigent mental spirit. I always wanted things.