But the participants [in war] never forgot the details of their experience, and like the Wandering Jew, they were condemned to remain their own history books, each containing a story they could not pass on to others and from which no one would learn anything of value.

If you put somebody on a crack pipe and give them a 9 mm Baretta, you don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out what's going to happen next.

The best thing about being a best-selling writer is being a best-selling writer. More seriously, today I can write full time and pay the bills.

I could only wonder again at the white race's naïveté in always sending forth our worst members as our emissaries.

Success, like fashion, is a fickle companion and can leave one in the wink of an eye.

A lie is an act of theft. It steals peoples faith and makes them resent themselves

I think the "crime novel" has replaced the sociological novel of the 1930s. I think the progenitor of that tradition is James M. Cain, who in my view is the most neglected writer in American literature.