An ugly woman with a gun is a terrible thing.

We writers, as we work our way deeper into our craft, learn to drop more and more personal clues. Like burglars who secretly wish to be caught, we leave our fingerprints on broken locks, our voiceprints in bugged rooms, our footprints in the wet concrete.

An ugly woman with a gun is a terrible thing.

The surprise with which a detective novel concludes should set up tragic vibrations which run backward through the entire structure.

I have a secret passion for mercy. . . but justice is what keeps happening to people.

I wanted to write as well as I possibly could to deal with life-and-death problems in contemporary society. And the form of Wilkie Collins and Graham Greene, of Hammett and Chandler, seemed to offer me all the rope I would ever need.

I used to think the world was divided into good people and bad people, that you could pin responsibility for evil on certain definite people and punish the guilty. I’m still going through the motions.