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

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.

How did I change my life? I wanted things. I wanted women and I wanted to write books.

You try to learn who you are. You work hard. You've either got it or you don't when it comes to writing books. And you tend to only get these things if you want them, and want them to the exclusion of everything else.

As critical acclaim and response has built up, every interview I give is a chance to puncture the myth I've created about my work and refine it.

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

History is a state of yearning. I yearn for Kay Lake throughout this entire thing. There's an essay I've written where I talked about living in the past. There's a whole motif in the book of then and now. And I lived there.