I found myself wishing that we could live like the birds and move through nature without hurting it our ourselves.

The Archer novels are about various kinds of brokenness.

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

As a man gets older, if he knows what is good for him,, the women he likes are getting older too. The trouble is that most of them are married.

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.

The walls were lined with books, many of them in foreign languages, like insulation against the immediate present.

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