"Hell lies at the bottom of the human heart." — Ross MacDonald

We writers, as we work our way deeper into our craft, learn to drop more and more personal clues. Like burglars who secretly wish to be caught, we leave our fingerprints on broken locks, our voiceprints in bugged rooms, our footprints in the wet concrete.

There are certain families whose members should all live in different towns - different states, if possible - and write each other letters once a year.

Nothing is wrong with California that a rise in the ocean level wouldn't cure.

I knew how it was with drunks. They ran out of generosity, even for themselves.

My half-suppressed Canadian years, my whole childhood and youth, rose like a corpse from the bottom of the sea to confront me.

The Archer novels are about various kinds of brokenness.

I wanted to write as well as I possibly could to deal with life-and-death problems in contemporary society. And the form of Wilkie Collins and Graham Greene, of Hammett and Chandler, seemed to offer me all the rope I would ever need.

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Hell lies at the bottom of the human heart.