I never know what I'm going to write next, and when I think I do I usually turn out to be mistaken.

Ideas come to people who are receptive to them.

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

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.

I don't know about the rest of the country but in New York more people have learned anonymity from rent control than ever discovered it in a twelve-step program.

My mother's father was from Sligo, and he used to say it was the hardest thing in the world to find a man alive in Dublin who wasn't in the GPO during the Easter Rising. Twenty brave men marched into that post office, he said, and thirty thousand marched out.

I never know what I'm going to write next, and when I think I do I usually turn out to be mistaken.