One thing that helps is to give myself permission to write badly. I tell myself that I'm going to do my five or 10 pages no matter what, and that I can always tear them up the following morning if I want. I'll have lost nothing-writing and tearing up five pages would leave me no further behind than if I took the day off.

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

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.

To say I drank my way into marriage isn't much of an exaggeration, and it's none at all to say I drank my way out of it.

One aspect of serendipity to bear in mind is that you have to be looking for something in order to find something else.

As a friend of mine, herself a writer, says, 'People who spend the most meaningful hours of their lives in the exclusive company of imaginary people are apt to be a little strange'

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.