For David Parker and Daniel Parker, with the respect and admiration of their father, who grew up with them.
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.
Would you care to publish this? Sincerely, Robert B. Parker.
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.
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!'
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.
Very few of my books are about who stole the Maltese Falcon.
I didn't have to say it. I just had to write it. It was painful enough.
Sure, I have advice for people starting to write. Don't. I don't need the competition.
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.
'All Our Yesterdays' was unquestionably the best work I have ever done. And the reading public stayed away in droves.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
With so much at stake maybe I'll just leave now.
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.
