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

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

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

When there's trouble in a family, it tends to show up in the weakest member. And all the other members of the family know that. They make allowances for the one in trouble.

The Archer novels are about various kinds of brokenness.

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.

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.