Something I learned long ago. It is not necessary to know what a person is afraid of. It is enough to know the person is afraid.

When you get older, keeping the private stuff private seems less important.

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

Everybody's weird, fundamentally everybody is a snap. Sometimes it's a sexual thing and sometimes it's a different kind of weirdness, but one way or another everybody's nuts.

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

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.

As my late mother famously observed, the one thing to be said for growing old is that every year there are a few more things I don’t have to give a rat’s ass about.