The walls of books around him, dense with the past, formed a kind of insulation against the present world of disasters.

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

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.

The Archer novels are about various kinds of brokenness.

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

An ugly woman with a gun is a terrible thing.

I like a little danger. Tame danger, controlled by me. It gives me a sense of power, I guess, to take my life in my hands and know damn well I’m not going to lose it.