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Quotes by Robert Parker

After my best side again, aren't you?
– Robert Parker
All Our Yesterdays was unquestionably the best work I have ever done. And the reading public stayed away in droves.
– Robert Parker
As I say, I'm not sure I'd have undertaken it... Oh, yeah, I would. They were offering me a hell of a lot of money.
– Robert Parker
Being a professor and working are not the same thing. The academic community is composed largely of nitwits. If I may generalize. People who don't know very much about what matters very much, who view life through literature rather than the other way around.
– Robert Parker
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 Parker
For David Parker and Daniel Parker, with the respect and admiration of their father, who grew up with them.
– Robert Parker
I didn't have to say it. I just had to write it. It was painful enough.
– Robert Parker
I don't go to the movies, and I never watch television except ballgames and Law & Order. I can talk along with the reruns now. My lips move with Mike Logan's.
– Robert Parker
I don't imagine I would have chosen to spend the last twenty-six years of my life writing about a character whose values and virtues I disdained.
– Robert Parker
I don't want to work hard on a book that is not going to be published in my lifetime. I want the money now! And, of course, I want to see the book published.
– Robert Parker
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.
– Robert 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.
– Robert Parker
I have known an interesting, sexy, independent woman for some 50 years and have had many opportunities to observe her in many different situations. And one of the many things I have learned during the course of our relationship is that ultimately the things that separate women from men are less significant than the things that we have in common with each other.
– Robert Parker
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.
– Robert Parker
I hereby resign from Prudential Insurance Company of America. As I look back over my years with the company, I note there have been three of them.
– Robert Parker
I love Joan's indomitability and intelligence. She's very courageous. And she's a hell of a kisser.
– Robert Parker
I rarely write Spenser: For Hire. The ABC series is based on characters created by me, and I serve on the program as a consultant. As we all know, a consultant's first responsibility is to deposit the check every week. After that, I read each script and make suggestions.
– Robert Parker
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!
– Robert 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.
– Robert Parker
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 Parker
I used to teach fiction-writing very unsuccessfully - either 'cause the kids were stupid or... Ahh, must have the kids.
– Robert Parker
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 Parker
I was someplace the other day. Too modest. I was winning the prestigious Hale Award, which is given annually in Newport, New Hampshire for anyone who'll go up and accept it. I don't get that many awards, friends. So it was a three-hour drive?
– Robert Parker
I write five pages a day. If you would read five pages a day, we'd stay right even.
– Robert Parker
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.
– Robert Parker
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 Parker
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.
– Robert Parker
Joan and I separated in 1982 and reunited in 1984, at which time we had arrived at the conclusion that it probably wasn't a good idea for us to share the same living space twenty-four hours a day.
– Robert Parker
Joan organizes our social life, and on weekends I follow her around.
– Robert Parker
Just doing what I'm supposed to do! That's why I get paid the big bucks!
– Robert Parker
My older son who is, I think, here tonight, is forty-one years old. Which is odd because so am I.
– Robert Parker
My wife and sons were all there during the course of my hospitalization; if there was any benefit for me from the experience it was seeing that my sons were everything that I would want my adult children to be. They were very supportive of their mother, unintimidated by the doctors. I couldn't have asked for better.
– Robert Parker
On the big issues, Joan and I are amazingly in tune, but on the creature-comfort level, we're incompatible.
– Robert Parker
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.
– Robert Parker
She found me intolerable. But she got to know me, and I wore her down.
– Robert Parker
So it's - the book is the book, the movie is the movie, the money is the money, and - you know?
– Robert Parker
Sure, I have advice for people starting to write. Don't. I don't need the competition.
– Robert Parker
Teaching is too strong a word for whatever it was I did at Northeastern University.
– Robert Parker
Their Spenser, Robert Urich, is big, graceful, good-looking and young (a runner-up in the Robert B. Parker look-alike contest).
– Robert Parker
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!'
– Robert Parker
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.
– Robert Parker
Very few of my books are about who stole the Maltese Falcon.
– Robert Parker
Well, you give me too much credit for foresight and planning. I haven't got a clue what the hell I'm doing.
– Robert Parker
With so much at stake maybe I'll just leave now.
– Robert Parker
Would you care to publish this? Sincerely, Robert B. Parker.
– Robert Parker
You have to know what you can do. And you can't castigate yourself for not being able to do what somebody else does.
– Robert Parker