Anyone who says, 'Books don't change anything,' or - more commonly - that crime fiction is the wrong genre for promoting social change - should take a closer look.
Foreign policy is inseparable from domestic policy now. Is terrorism foreign policy or domestic policy? It's both. It's the same with crime, with the economy, climate change.
For a government to declare a vice to be a crime, and to punish it as such, is an attempt to falsify the very nature of things. It is as absurd as it would be to declare truth to be falsehood, or falsehood truth.
With all the hundreds of dresses and shoes I have, it would be an absolute crime if I don't have a little girl. I have a whole room at home filled with my stage wear.
Vices are simply the errors which a man makes in his search after his own happiness. Unlike crimes, they imply no malice toward others, and no interference with their persons or property.
I love thinking about American history, thinking about LA history. I love brooding on crime.
I stated that Hiroshima and Nagasaki are 'among the most unspeakable crimes in history.' I took no position on just where they stand on the scale of horrors relative to Auschwitz, the bombing of Chungking, Lidice, and so on.
The history of man is the history of crimes, and history can repeat. So information is a defence. Through this we can build, we must build, a defence against repetition.
I have no favourite genre or style but treat each novel with the same care, imagination and craftsmanship. It's as difficult to write a crime or a children's novel with a touch of style and grace as it is a literary novel.
What shocks me is that so many people leave care and become homeless, and when you're homeless you get into crime, prostitution and drugs, and it is a vicious circle. That's what we need to change.
The idea of the sacred is quite simply one of the most conservative notions in any culture, because it seeks to turn other ideas - uncertainty, progress, change - into crimes.
A number of years ago, I found a book of photography by Weegee; he was a crime photographer in the 1930s in New York. He was the first person to put a police scanner in a car and drive around.
As much as I transferred my mother to Elizabeth Shore of The Black Dahlia, as much as her dad mutated into an obsession with crime in general, well, I have thought about other things throughout the years.
Tragedy occurs when a human soul awakes and seeks, in suffering and pain, to free itself from crime, violence, infamy, even at the cost of life. The struggle is the tragedy - not defeat or death.
We are afraid to face the hard questions. We are willing to tackle drugs, crime, and public education only if it doesn't cost us any new taxes.
American culture is torn between our long romance with violence and our terror of the devastation wrought by war and crime and environmental havoc.
The accumulation of personal wealth and the extension of commercial transactions have developed a great and lamentable increase in certain classes of crimes, while the improvements in transport have largely facilitated the escape of fugitive criminal...
I've just done a film in the United States. It's a thriller called 'A Crime', with Harvey Keitel, we play against each other, and it's so great to play in another language. But I'm definitely not American.
And it's a crime because the great plays of history, going all the way back to the Greeks, are part of everybody's heritage. It's just like in music, Beethoven or Mozart, that's everybody's heritage.
That's what a good crime novelist - any good novelist - should do with you: play with your perceptions while showing you everything in plain sight.
I read true crime books, and I read when people do case studies of stuff. I'm into books like that. Case studies or forensics or murder - all that good stuff.
