I had achieved the most important things in my life when I married Joan and had the sons. Given the choice between Joan and the boys, and being a writer, I world give up being...

I took my .38 out and looked to see that there were bullets in all the proper places. I knew there would be, but it did no harm to be careful. And I’d seen Clint...

I think at this stage in my life I have learned that there are any number of things that men will never know, and can never hope to know, about women.

I was on the Oprah Winfrey Show once. It was a really slow news day for Oprah, and there were several of us on ’cause none of us was sufficiently interesting by his or herself.

Writer’s block? I’ve never heard of a plumber complain about plumber’s block.

College had little effect on me. I’d have been the same writer if I’d gone to MIT, except I’d have flunked out sooner.

It’s tempting to say the Ph.D. didn’t have an effect, but it’s not so. I think whatever resonance I may be able to achieve is in part simply from the amount of reading and learning...

If you want to write, write it. That’s the first rule. And send it in, and send it in to someone who can publish it or get it published. Don’t send it to me. Don’t...

She found me intolerable. But she got to know me, and I wore her down.

I really don’t know what I am going to do in terms of what a book is going to be about until I actually start writing it!

They give me the money, I give them the book. Having input into the adaptation would be kind of like selling a house and coming back three years later and saying, ‘Paint it this color!’

I think finally good writing gets out there, and people like it, and bad writing doesn’t. Well, no. Bad writing does get out there ’cause some people like it.

I write five pages a day. If you would read five pages a day, we’d stay right even.

‘All Our Yesterdays’ was unquestionably the best work I have ever done. And the reading public stayed away in droves.

I didn’t have to say it. I just had to write it. It was painful enough.

Would you care to publish this? Sincerely, Robert B. Parker.

This is not a screenplay. I don’t do twenty drafts. I’m not going to show this to you until it’s published or accepted for publication. You can make whatever suggestions you want, but I probably...

With so much at stake maybe I’ll just leave now.

It was not just that Ross Macdonald taught us how to write; he did something much more, he taught us how to read, and how to think about life, and maybe, in some small, but...

Well, you give me too much credit for foresight and planning. I haven’t got a clue what the hell I’m doing.

For David Parker and Daniel Parker, with the respect and admiration of their father, who grew up with them.

Send it to someone who can publish it. And if they won’t publish it, send it to someone else who can publish it! And keep sending it! Of course, if no one will publish it,...

I have reached the point where I know that as long as I sit down to write, the ideas will come. What they will be, I don’t know.

My older son who is, I think, here tonight, is forty-one years old. Which is odd because so am I.

Yeah. Floyd is his batman.”His what?”Batman, like in the British army, each officer had a batman, a personal servant.”You spend too much time reading, Spenser. You know more stuff that don’t make you money than...

Pearl was hurring around my apartment, sniffing everything, including Rich Beaumont and Patty Giacomin, which neither of them like much.”Can you get Pearl to settle down?” Paul asked.”I could speak to her, but she’d continue...

Joan organizes our social life, and on weekends I follow her around.

Sure, I have advice for people starting to write. Don’t. I don’t need the competition.

…You have any suggestions, make them. I’m in charge but humble. No need to salute when you see me.” Fraser said, “Mind if we snicker every once in a while behind your back?” “Hell, no,”...

See, being a person is kind of random and arbitrary business. You may have noticed that. And you need to believe in something to keep it from being too random and arbitrary to handle. Some...

Very few of my books are about who stole the Maltese Falcon.

Teaching is too strong a word for whatever it was I did at Northeastern University.

After a while I got hungry and went to the kitchen. There was nothing to eat. I drank another beer and looked again, and found half a loaf of whole wheat bread behind the beer...

The thing I like about Irish whiskey is that the more you drink the smoother it goes down. Of course that’s probably true of antifreeze as well, but illusion is nearly all we have.

I got thrown out of school several weeks in my senior year being caught in the girls’ dorm. This was 1954, friends. The girls’ dorm was off limits. Even to girls, I think.