You know what I did after I wrote my first novel? I shut up and wrote twenty-three more.
When I am so intensely involved with writing my books I don’t like to reread them.
There is no client as scary as an innocent man.
Any writer would rather dig into character than dig into fancy plots.
I’m a disciple of Raymond Chandler, who said in his essays that there’s a quality of redemption in anything that can be called art.
I’m not ‘Mr. No-By-The-Book.’ I just want to make sure the character is by the book.
I’ve learned over the years that sometimes if you ask the same question more than once you get different responses.
What is important is not what you hear said, it’s what you observe.
I don’t miss being a reporter as a job, but I do miss the everyday interaction with the front line of law enforcement. I still have a cadre of cops who keep me up to date, but I don’t have the access I used to.
As a reporter, you develop an ear for dialogue because it’s your job to capture it accurately.
You can’t patch a wounded soul with a Band-Aid.
The Chicago Way is a wonderful first novel. Michael Harvey has studied the masters and put his own unique touch on the crime novel. This book harkens the arrival of a major new voice.
How I work is that I write a story I’d like to read. Then you fly to Paris or Sydney and the interviewers talk about the greater significance of your work.
Maybe it has something to do with being a reporter for a long time that I don’t look to newspapers and television and so forth for inspiration most of the time.
Money. The ultimate motivation. The ultimate way of keeping score.
I view people two ways. They’re either eye-for-an-eye people or they are turn-the-cheek people.
Momentum was momentum, whether you found it in music or on the street or in the beat of your own heart.
As a bassist he could never really be a sideman. He was always the anchor. He drove the beat. even if it was behind Miles Davis’a horn.
What is jealousy but a reflection of your own failures?
She refused to accept the simple truism that the better you were, the bigger threat you were to those at the top...