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!'

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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

She found me intolerable. But she got to know me, and I wore her down.

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

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

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

With so much at stake maybe I'll just leave now.

Would you care to publish this? Sincerely, Robert B. Parker.

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.