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" 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. "

Robert B. Parker

Slow

Day

News

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

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

Robert B. Parker

You

Planning

" 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. "

" 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!' "

" Joan organizes our social life, and on weekends I follow her around. "

" 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! "

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

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

Robert B. Parker

Respect

Father

" 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. "

Robert B. Parker

Same

Writer

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

" 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. "

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

" I write five pages a day. If you would read five pages a day, we'd stay right even. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

Robert B. Parker

Think

Good

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

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

" It was not just that Ross Macdonald taught us how to write; he did something much more, he taught us how to read, and how to think about life, and maybe, in some small, but mattering way, how to live. "

Robert B. Parker

Think

Small

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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