A biography for Robert B. Parkerhasn’t been written yet.
“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.”
“With so much at stake maybe I'll just leave now.”
“'All Our Yesterdays' was unquestionably the best work I have ever done. And the reading public stayed away in droves.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Rachel drank some more bourbon. “What I am trying to do,” she said, “is tothank you. And to say it as genuinely as I can. I do thank you. I will remember aslong as I live when you came into the room and got me, and I will alwaysremember when you killed them, and I was glad, and you came and we put ourarms around each other. And I will always remember that you cried.”
“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 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.”
“She found me intolerable. But she got to know me, and I wore her down.”
“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!'”
“My older son who is, I think, here tonight, is forty-one years old. Which is odd because so am I.”
“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 in the back of the refrigerator...”
“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.”
“Joan organizes our social life, and on weekends I follow her around.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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 didn't have to say it. I just had to write it. It was painful enough.”
“Teaching is too strong a word for whatever it was I did at Northeastern University.”