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

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

Nothing is wrong with California that a rise in the ocean level wouldn't cure.

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.

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.

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.