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.

Hell lies at the bottom of the human heart.

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.

Freud was one of the greatest influences on me. He made myth into psychiatry, and I've been trying to turn it back into myth again.

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

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