Robert B. Parker

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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

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

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!'