Tell me anything. Tell me everything. Revoke our time apart. Love me fierce in danger.

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.

There are a lot of Ellroy lifts, man. This guy went to school. But then there's a willful thing that comes over me - God gives it to me - where I go, "That's real nice, let's just go home, pat yourself on the back, good dog, good dog, and wake up in the morning and go to work."

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 needed to address that I've had some profound moral shifts in my own life.

My father actually went to college, and my mother went to nursing school, so, you know. I wouldn't... They were actually too square and right-wing to be hip, too well-educated to be white trash, too sexy to be square. They really didn't fit any mold. They weren't really hipsters. They were just - they were two of a kind, those two.

I don't feel in any way obligated to remain current with the culture. I feel no social obligation whatsoever. I trust my morality in the narrow path I trek through the world as I work.