Robert B. Parker
Robert B. Parker
Robert Brown Parkerwas an American crime writer. His most famous works were the 40 novels written about the private detective Spenser. ABC television network developed the television series Spenser: For Hire based on the character in the mid-1980s; a series of TV movies based on the character were also produced. His works incorporate encyclopedic knowledge of the Boston metropolitan area. The Spenser novels have been cited by critics and bestselling authors such as Robert Crais, Harlan Coben and Dennis Lehane...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth17 September 1932
CountryUnited States of America
If you are going to live life on your own terms, there need to be terms, and somehow you need to live up to them.
You do the best you can and you deal with the consequences. It's all there is.
Yeah. Floyd is his batman." His what?" Batman, like in the British army, each officer had a batman, a personal servant." You spend too much time reading, Spenser. You know more stuff that don't make you money than anybody I know.
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.
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.
We split a bottle of Norman cider. Not everybody sells Norman cider by the bottle. "Has a European feel" Susan said. "That sounds terrific" I said. "Can I have one?" Susan grinned at me. "How did you ever get to be so big without growing up?" she said. "Iron self-control" I said.
I took my .38 out and looked to see that there were bullets in all the proper places. I knew there would be, but it did no harm to be careful. And I'd seen Clint Eastwood do it once in the movies.
Both our opinions are rooted in our experience," I said. "Both of them are true, it's just that we've had different experiences.
Teaching is too strong a word for whatever it was I did at Northeastern University
There can never be any substitute for your own palate nor any better education than tasting the wine yourself.
Fourteen years in the professor dodge has taught me that one can argue ingeniously on behalf of any theory, applied to any piece of literature. This is rarely harmful, because normally no-one reads such essays.
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.
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.