"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 mattering way, how to live."

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

"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, at that point you might want to think about doing something other than writing."

"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 a writer without a blink."

"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."

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

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

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

"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 that I acquired along the way."

"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."

"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 will ignore them entirely."

"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."

"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 show it to your spouse, or your significant other, or your parents, or somebody. They're not going to publish it."

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

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

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

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

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

"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!"

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

"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."

"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."

"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!'"

"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."

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