“And every place and time an author writes about is imaginary, from Oz to Raymond Chandler's L.A. to Dickens's London.”

“[Raymond Chandler] wrote as if pain hurt and life mattered.”

“Raymond Chandler invented a new way of talking about America, and America has never looked the same to us since.”

“[N]o such thing as objective writing, . . . every inscription, every traveler's tale, every news account, every piece of technical writing, tells more about the author and his time than it does about the ostensible subject.”

“Every city has a sex and an age which have nothing to do with demography. Rome is feminine. So is Odessa. London is a teenager, an urchin, and in this hasn’t changed since the time of Dickens. Paris, I believe, is a man in his twenties in love with an older woman.”

“If there's another writer, like Ross McDonald or Raymond Chandler, and all they're writing are mysteries, they won't be accepted," he said. "And that's problematic. A lot of so-called literary novels are just not very good. They're not well-written, they're not well-thought-out. They have pyrotechnics of intelligence."On the other hand, some of the best writers and speculative ideas are in science-fiction. The science-fiction genre is completely, completely segregated. And these people are writing good stuff. They're writing about where you're going, which means they're talking about where you are.”