Robert B. Parker quotes:

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

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 anybody I know.

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.

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

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 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'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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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 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.

Fourteen years in the professor dodge has taught me that one can argue ingeniously on behalf of any theory, applied to any piece of literature. This is rarely harmful, because normally no-one reads such essays.

There's something about being able to literally consume a work of art - then to divide all that pleasure of it - because it's a memory. A great wine for me is a memory, it's an extraordinary experience.

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

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

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.

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

We split a bottle of Norman cider. Not everybody sells Norman cider by the bottle. "Has a European feel" Susan said. "That sounds terrific" I said. "Can I have one?" Susan grinned at me. "How did you ever get to be so big without growing up?" she said. "Iron self-control" I said.

This was 1954, friends. The girls' dorm was off limits. Even to girls, I think.

Being a professor and working are not the same thing. The academic community is composed largely of nitwits. If I may generalize. People who don't know very much about what matters very much, who view life through literature rather than the other way around.

Both our opinions are rooted in our experience," I said. "Both of them are true, it's just that we've had different experiences.

Coincidence exists, but believing in it never did me any good.

Has anyone ever told you," I said, "that you coalesce reality?" "No. They only say that I'm good in the sack." "They are accurate but limited," I said. "And if you give me their names I'll kill them.

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.

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 needed to find my way to write. I need about six hours of uninterrupted time in order to produce about two hours of writing, and when I accepted that and found the way to do it, then I was able to write.

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!

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 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 Eastwood do it once in the movies.

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

If you are going to live life on your own terms, there need to be terms, and somehow you need to live up to them.

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

The key to growing up well, is being tough enough.

There can never be any substitute for your own palate nor any better education than tasting the wine yourself.

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

Yeah. Floyd is his batman.

You do the best you can and you deal with the consequences. It's all there is.