I am a master of fiction. I am also the greatest crime novelist who ever lived. I am to the crime novel in specific what Tolstoy is to the Russian novel and what Beethoven is to music.

The 250-page outline for American Tabloid. The books are so dense. They're so complex, you cannot write like I write off the top of your head. It's the combination of that meticulousness and the power of the prose and, I think, the depth of the characterizations and the risks that I've taken with language that give the books their clout. And that's where I get pissed off at a lot of my younger readers.

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

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

You get up in the morning because you might meet a woman. And if you stay at home by yourself, alone, you will not meet a woman.

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.

I would like to provoke ambiguous responses in my readers.