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

I don't want to recover from writing this book [The Onion]. I feel very poised. I feel like I'm with my mother for the first time ever. I feel like I've confronted her, and the confrontation goes on.

To me, there's nothing on earth other than women. It's why I get out of bed every morning.

I am a master of fiction. I am also the greatest crime novelist who ever lived. I am to the crime novel in specific what Tolstoy is to the Russian novel and what Beethoven is to music.

I am the most well-adjusted human being I know. I started out this investigation as a very happy man with a great career. I've got the life people dream about: I am rich, I am famous, I've got a fabulous marriage to an absolutely, spell-bindingly brilliant woman.

Noir is dead for me because historically, I think it's a simple view. I've taken it as far as it can go. I think I've expanded on it a great deal, taken it further than any other American novelist.

Classical music fulfills for me the function of narrative. I spend 90 minutes a day listening to symphonic music - Beethoven to Bartók - some chamber pieces, and that's my enrichment.