To me, there's nothing on earth other than women. It's why I get out of bed every morning..

The 250-page outline for American Tabloid. The books are so dense. They're so complex, you cannot write like I write off the top of your head. It's t….

I like to have fun out there. I work hard, and then I get to cut loose and go out and tour, and I enjoy it. I like to go out and meet the people. I l….

I was a WASP kid going to a high school that was 99 percent Jewish and I wanted attention and I wanted to make a spectacle of myself because I couldn….

I begin by assembling notes on characters. Large swaths of the plot become clear to me as I do this..

I'm way past the idea of using ideology or political view as a gauge of human character. I simply don't believe it. And many people, I tend to think ….

I don't want to recover from writing this book [The Onion]. I feel very poised. I feel like I'm with my mother for the first time ever. I feel like I….

I am conservative by temperament. I disapprove of criminal activity. I am very solidly and markedly on the side of authority. The truth is I would ra….

History is a state of yearning. I yearn for Kay Lake throughout this entire thing. There's an essay I've written where I talked about living in the p….

The novel is final form; it's the ultimate individual final form. Television and motion pictures never get there. You'd be fabulous to think that som….

Raymond Chandler once wrote that Dashiell Hammett gave murder back to the people who really committed it..

My role relationship to the event will continue to mutate. My relationship to my mother will continue to change as I revise my judgments of her depen….

Other people, some other writers, will win certain accolades or sell in far greater numbers than me - and I'm a legitimate best-selling author - but ….

As much as I transferred my mother to Elizabeth Shore of The Black Dahlia, as much as her dad mutated into an obsession with crime in general, well, ….

Cats gotta scratch. Dogs gotta bite. I gotta write..