Both our opinions are rooted in our experience," I said. "Both of them are true, it's just that we've had different experiences.

Fourteen years in the professor dodge has taught me that one can argue ingeniously on behalf of any theory, applied to any piece of literature. This is rarely harmful, because normally no-one reads such essays.

Very few of my books are about who stole the Maltese Falcon

This was 1954, friends. The girls' dorm was off limits. Even to girls, I think.

Yeah. Floyd is his batman." His what?" Batman, like in the British army, each officer had a batman, a personal servant." You spend too much time reading, Spenser. You know more stuff that don't make you money than anybody I know.

I have reached the point where I know that as long as I sit down to write, the ideas will come. What they will be, I don't know.

It's tempting to say the Ph.D. didn't have an effect, but it's not so. I think whatever resonance I may be able to achieve is in part simply from the amount of reading and learning that I acquired along the way