Robert B. Parker Quotes

No olive?" I said. "Only a fucking beast would have an olive in his martini,

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.

Can you analyze our relationship in the light of Silvermanian pragmatism?" I said.

"I love you because I find it compelling to be loved so entirely. You love me
because as long as you do you can believe in romantic love.

Hawk drifted around behind me in $5000 worth of clothes earning his $150 a day. We saw nothing interesting. We

I can't put the profession ahead of the people it's supposed to serve," Susan said. "It would be like teachers who care more about education than students.

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.

One of the things that made Susan so interesting was the fact that she looked like a Jewish princess and worked like a Bulgarian peasant.

My champagne is gone. Do you think you are, if you'll pardon the phrase, up for another transport of ecstasy?

Being tough means looking straight at something ugly, and saying, "That's ugly; I'll have to find a way to deal with it." And doing so.

I sometimes think I know you entirely," I said. "You know me better than anyone ever has," Susan said. "And yet you're quite secretive," I said. "You surprise me often.

Walked out without a word. Fogarty nodded at Petrocelli,

L.A. It was a big sunny buffoon of a city; corny and ornate and disorganized but kind of fun. The last hallucination, the dwindled fragment of - what had Fitzgerald called it? - "the last and greatest of all human dreams." It was where we'd run out of room, where the dream had run up against the ocean, and human voices woke us. Los Angeles was the butt end, where we'd spat it out with our mouths tasting of ashes, but a genial failure of a place for all of that.

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.

So far so good. I had a recently widowed mother and her orphaned son crying hysterically. Maybe for an encore I could shoot the family dog.

I could feel the tension radiate from my solar plexus and jangle along the nerve circuitry. It had nothing to do with the weather.

The thing is," I said, "that to be what I am, I need to feel the way I do about you. No matter how you feel about me."

"I feel good about you," she said. "I do love you, you know."

"Yeah. But even if you didn't. The way I feel about you is my problem, not yours. And it's absolute. It can't be compromised. It could exist without you."

"Dead or alive," Susan said. In her face was that quality of serious amusement that so often invested her.

Shopping is never over," Susan said. "It is merely suspended.

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.

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.

Would you care to publish this? Sincerely, 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.

There is a knife blade in the grass," I said. "And a tiger lies just outside the fire." "My God, Spenser, that's bathetic. Either tell me about what hurts or don't. But for crissake, don't sit here and quote bad verse at me." "Oh damn," I said. "I was just going to swing into Hamlet." "You do and I'll call the cops." "Okay," I said. "You're right. But bathetic? That's hard, Suze.

The young man void of understanding may be depended upon to fall into the ditch of debauchery without much pushing, and

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.

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

Words can," Susan said. "And tone of voice. You're just so goddamned autonomous that you won't explain yourself to anybody.

Because I love you," I said. "Because you are in my life like the music at the edge of silence.

You wanted me to insist. You wanted me to win the argument."
"Wanted is too simple," Susan said. She had shifted her gaze from her martini to the ongoing afternoon outside her kitchen window.
"I wanted and didn't want. I needed both my autonomy and your protection. By acting the way I did, I managed to have both.

Even in her cap and gown Susan looked like a sunrise, extravagant and full of promise. Wherever she went things seemed, as they always did, to organize around her.

And it's the reason I wanted you to live with me." "Not because I am cuter than a bug's ear?" "That too," Susan said. "But mostly I wanted to pretend to be what I had never been.

Sartre claimed that hell is other people," I said. "He never saw no TV game show," Hawk said.

Got nothing to do with us," I said. "I'm working on a case. You're my trusty sidekick." "Long as I don't have to call you Kemo Sabe." "Ever wonder what that meant?" I said. "I always thought it meant Paleface Motherfucker," Hawk said. "That's probably it," I said.

How about the wrong crowd," I said. "You getting in with them?"
"Not much luck," Paul said. "I'm trying like hell, but the wrong crowd doesn't seem to want me."
"Don't quit," I said. "You want something, you go after it. I was nearly thirty-five before I could get in with wrong crowd.

I was doing curls. Hawk said, "How you and Susan doing?" "Love is lovelier," I said, "the second time around." "Worth the scramble," Hawk said.

You right," Hawk said. "Couldn't happen. Be like J. Edgar Hoover running around in a dress."
"Exactly," I said. "Impossible.

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

She's a sicko, Hawk." "Ah ain't planning to screw her psyche, babe.

And Quirk's a captain now," he said.
"Captain Quirk?"
The motorcycle cop grinned.
"Captain Quirk," he said.

The rich really are very different," Tyler Costigan was saying. "Especially if they are also unscrupulous." ... "They have always gotten what they wished, and after a while they think they are supposed to. If they have a problem they hire someone to solve it. And they become ever more contemptuous of people who cannot. They even become contemptuous of people who have problems. And eventually they are contemptuous of everyone and care only about what they want.

What is it," Pam Shepard said, "about a cluster of skyscrapers in the distance that makes you feel ... What? ... Romantic? Melancholy? Excited? Excited probably."
"Promise," I said.
"Of what?"
"Of everything," I said. "From a distance they promise everything, whatever you're after. They look clean and permanent against the sky like that. Up close you notice dog litter around the foundations."
"Are you saying it's not real? The look of skyscapers from a distance."
"No. It's real enough, I think. But so is the dog litter and if you spend all your time looking at the spires you're going to step in it."
"Into each life some shit must fall?"
"Ah," I said, "you put it so much more gracefully than I.

But a lot of people got married so they could fuck six times a week. Then in a while they only felt like fucking once a week and had to talk to each other in between. Created a lot of drunks.

Susan said, "Have you given any thought to how we should spend Christmas?" "Only that we should be together." I glanced over at the softly snoring Pearl. "With Pearl, of course. Hawk, too. Maybe

She wore a lot of makeup, badly applied. There was lipstick on her teeth. If she'd been a dancer, it must have been in Fantasia.

The [living] room was as intimate as an operating room but not as welcoming.

The point is not to get hung up on being what you're supposed to be. If you can, it's good to do what pleases you.

You and Galileo," I said.
"Didn't he throw his balls off the leaning tower?" Quirk Said.

How the hell can you be liberated and accept alimony?" I said.
Again the smile, innocent, beautiful, glorious, and satanic. "Exploit the oppressor," she said.

Susan had decided to sit by the pool at the hotel with a copy of a book by Alice Miller called The Drama of the Gifted Child.

Thank you sir," she said. "I hope that your friend feels better soon."
I shrugged. "The ways of the Lord" I said, "are often dark, but never pleasant.

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.

Tony's patois kept getting broader as we talked. Like Hawk, he seemed able to turn it on and off. "Sho 'nuff," he said.

Sandy's face was very close to mine in the crowded room. She had a wide mouth and a lot of teeth. She had turned in her seat so that she had one thigh on each side of my leg. Her chest was against my arm. In another minute we wouldn't have to go anywhere to have sex.

You walked a mile in the rain to drink hot water?"
"To be with you," she said. "You're better than pie."
And I turned under the umbrella and embraced her with my free arm and pressed my mouth against hers and held her hard against me and smelled her perfume and closed my eyes and kissed her for a long time in the still rain, and even after

In the bank they did the same kind of stuff the fortune-teller and the bookie had done. But they dressed better.

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

Sometimes it's better to be lucky than good. ~ Spenser

You ever f**k Susan here?" she said, her face almost touching mine.
"I'm impressed," I said. "The question is intrusive, annoying, coarse, and voyeuristic. That's quite a lot to get into a simple question.

Asking your husband to go one-on-one with Joe Broz is like putting a guppy in the piranha pool. If we don't find him before Broz does, he'll be eaten alive.

Pearl was hurring around my apartment, sniffing everything, including Rich Beaumont and Patty Giacomin, which neither of them like much.
"Can you get Pearl to settle down?" Paul asked.
"I could speak to her, but she'd continue to do what she wants, and I'd look ineffectual. My approach is to endorse everything she does."
Susan said, "Come here, Pearl." And Pearl went over to her, and Susan gave her a kiss on the mouth, and Pearl wagged her tail; and lapped Susan's face, and turned and went back and sniffed at Patty.

Colt makes a heavy firearm." - Virgil Cole

If there are no things which are important, then things are assigned importance arbitrarily and defended at great risk. Because the risk validates the importance.

Freedom of the press is a flaming sword.
Use it wisely, hold it high, guard it well.

Jeez, on those TV real-life cop shows they don't do this. They got all kinds of guys with microscopes and computers figuring shit out.' 'We're a small department,' Jesse said. 'We can't afford smart people.' 'This could be a total waste of time,' Simpson said. 'Ah,' Jesse said, 'you are beginning to understand the intricacies of police work.

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 ...

The thing about monsters is, you want to kill them until you meet them, and when you meet them they don't seem monstrous, and killing them begins to seem unkind.

Dewar's and water," I said. "Yes. I don't care really, but everyone at work says if you don't order by name they give you bar whiskey.

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

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

I liked the myth elements of Christmas. The way in which its origins reach back far beyond Jesus, to the rituals of people unknown to us. The celebration of the winter solstice. The coming of light in the darkest time.

Check the parking lots, too, for the car.

Finally it was probably less the poverty that bred crime than the sour stench of racism that hung over anyplace where people are separated out by kind.

And rich older husbands," I said. "And perhaps some evidence of promiscuity," Susan said. "I mean, every young wife doesn't cheat on her husband. Why

Hawk could track a salmon to its spawning bed without getting wet. But

I don't think Hawk or I are operating on emotional whim. It's just the way we experience things sometimes needs to get translated sort of promptly into a, ah, course of action. So we have tended to bypass the meditative circuit."
"Wow," Hawk said.

There were worse things than being in love with two women. Better than being in love with none.

Too much positive is either scared or stupid or both. Reality is uncertain.

She walked a ways down the concourse, and looked back and waved and then turned a corner and was out of sight. I still stood for a moment, looking at the last place I had seen her, being careful not to be routine, while I became the other guy again, the one I was without her.

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.

It was that juxtaposition of how it used to be with how it had turned out that made L.A. so interesting and so sad a place, I thought.

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

Life is mostly metaphor.

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!

drank more scotch. "Probably he wasn't alone," I said. "Probably not," Hawk murmured. "So," I said. "How you want to handle this?

Paul a smart kid," Hawk said. "I know." "And he pretty strong," Hawk said. "He is." "Got from his uncle," Hawk said. "Uncle Hawk?" "Sho' nuff." "Jesus Christ," I said.

The evening stretches out against the sky, I thought. Like a patient etherized upon a table. I grinned to myself. Live fast, die young, and have a literate corpse.

Susan came down the hall in a white dress that fit her well. She looked like she was receiving an Academy Award for stunningness. I

Mary Lou Buckman and I sat in the first booth, and I, mindful of Wild Bill Hickok, sat facing the door.

We had our own sort of divorce back a while," I said.
"Yes."
"I was pretty crazy, I think."
"Yes," Susan said.
"You were pretty crazy," I said.
"Yes," she said. "I was."
"And we leapt tall buildings at a single bound."
"We were probably leaping the wrong ones," Susan said, "in those days."
"Maybe," I said. "But maybe those days helped us to leap the right ones now, and more gracefully.

Mary sat, quiet and attentive and blank. It wasn't like talking to a dumb seventh-grader, it was like talking to a pancake.

people trying to look like Eurotrash were sitting outside having various kinds of fancy coffee and looking at each other.

I was struggling happily with my ribs. Normally I ended up with barbecue sauce in my socks when I ate ribs, but I always figured they were worth it.

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.

He do that with me, too," Susan said. "It drives me fucking crazy." "Gee," I said, "I was liking it better when we were talking about Hawk's problems." Susan smiled.

I'm entirely fascinated with you," I said. "And what you are is a result of what you were, including the other men.

Not smoking gains in the area of lung cancer, but it loses badly in the realm of dramatic gestures.

None of us offered to shake hands. There was no advantage to letting somebody get hold of you.

Mostly I thought about Susan with her clothes off. This would solve nearly any problem I had,

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

One of Spenser's rules of detection is: Never poke around on an empty stomach. So I unpacked, got my gun, and went down for a club sandwich and

I do the best I can to approve and disapprove only of my own behavior. I don't always succeed, but I try. I'm trying now and I'm going to keep at it.