Quotes from Robert B. Parker

I had achieved the most important things in my life when I married Joan and had the sons. Given the choice between Joan and the boys, and being a writer, I world give up being a writer without a blink.

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.

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

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

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

I was on the Oprah Winfrey Show once. It was a really slow news day for Oprah, and there were several of us on 'cause none of us was sufficiently interesting by his or herself.

I think finally good writing gets out there, and people like it, and bad writing doesn't. Well, no. Bad writing does get out there 'cause some people like it.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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