There's none with me, although you've seen me before - I'm outrageous.

As a kid, I sensed history going on all around me, but the basic thrust of it didn't move me.

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.

L.A. ispolluted. It's overpopulated. But it is very much home. It was inevitable for me, the moving back. I was living in San Francisco, and Joan broke it off with me, and I needed a place to live. I'd been divorced. And I needed to write movies and TV shows to earn a living. Alimony. All that. So I figured what the hell, I'll go back to L.A.

Dead people belong to the live people who claim them most obsessively.

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.

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