Joe Wambaugh's a friend. I know him only casually, but I like him a lot. I think he likes my books.

Sometimes I'll leave the house and go to a delicatessen down the street from me - it's been there a million years - just because I can look at people.

Closure is a preposterous concept worthy of the worst aspects of American daytime TV.

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

Other people, some other writers, will win certain accolades or sell in far greater numbers than me - and I'm a legitimate best-selling author - but I live and die for the work. That's thrilling to me. It's thrilling that I do for others what certain writers did for me when I was a kid.

I wanted to portray a newly democratized, enclosed society. I wanted to show how extraordinarily fluid people are in their embrace of other human beings.

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