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

Anybody who doesn't know that politics is crime has got a few screws loose.

Rock and rollers can get you the youth buzz, and younger people are fanatical 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.

I learn things late-and only the hard way.

When I was a kid, Eisenhower had been President forever, and all of a sudden, everything in the world was all about Jack Kennedy. I was 12, interested in politics; my father was from Massachusetts, had an accent like Kennedy.

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