I am the most well-adjusted human being I know. I started out this investigation as a very happy man with a great career. I've got the life people dream about: I am rich, I am famous, I've got a fabulous marriage to an absolutely, spell-bindingly brilliant woman.

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

I wanted things. Whatever it cost and whatever it took, I would do it. And that's it.

You're grounded!!!! You can't go out and prowl the L.A. streets. You've got to do something more edifying, emboldening and altogether more groovy. You gots to stay home tonite and read a good book!!!!!!!!!!

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

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.

My guys are morally weak, and they reach toward a tenuous knowledge of self-sacrifice, and sometimes it's too late. I find that moving. It's not a life I'd want to live. But, then, I'm not completely my books.