Donald Westlake's Parker novels are among the small number of books I read over and over. Forget all that crap you've been telling yourself about War and Peace and Proust-these are the books you'll want on that desert island.

Man, I so sick of dinosaurs. They wasn't extinct, I'd go out an' kill 'em myself.

Our happiest moments as tourists always seem to come when we stumble upon one thing while in pursuit of something else.

I don't plan an awful lot in life just as I don't plan an awful lot in my fiction.

Booze and tobacco and lots of sex. It keeps a lad young.

I wouldn't presume to define noir - if we could define it, we wouldn't need to use a French word for it - but it seems to me it's more a way of looking at the world than what one sees.

And, as long as you can make yourself go on choosing the pain over the relief, you can keep going.