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

Raymond Chandler once wrote that Dashiell Hammett gave murder back to the people who really committed it.

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

I'm trying to be less bombastic. I love my books. I think I've done things nobody else has done.

Cats gotta scratch. Dogs gotta bite. I gotta write.