Robert Crais

Everything we are is anchored in our childhoods. The drama comes in how we deal with it. Are we slaves to our past, or can we rise above it? This is the stuff of great stories.

I write characters and stories that move me, and I write from the heart.

I think every writer of detective fiction writing today has been influenced by Mr. Parker. I'm of a generation that followed Robert Parker, and it was impossible to read the genre and not be influenced by him.

I love the fact that you collaborate with your readers when you write a book.

I tried to reject everything I knew as a TV writer when I decided to be a novelist, and the books didn't work. Finally I realized I should go back to all the techniques I'd learned.

My family was all police and hard hats at the refineries; they didn't know what to think about me. So I became a closet writer.

I was digging for stuff in a used bookstore, and I came upon 'Little Sister.' I fell in love with Chandler that night. I fell right down the rabbit hole of crime fiction.

I began to encounter real-life stories of dogs protecting their wounded or dying or dead handler... or dogs refusing to leave the bodies of the people they were bonded to, sitting in cemeteries for days or sometimes weeks. You find these stories endlessly.

L.A.'s magic has let me see every level of the dream.

Sometimes I am so dry that people don't know I'm kidding and think I'm being serious. I enjoy this because their reactions are often funny.

My fiction is almost always inspired by a character's need or desire to rise above him- or herself. No one is perfect and some of us have much adversity in our lives; it is those people who struggle to rise above their nature or background that I find the most interesting and heroic.

I love, love writing about Los Angeles. I love exploring every part of it. And I find, rather than a burden, it's actually one of the most enjoyable parts of the writing process for me. I love everything about L.A. Okay, not the traffic. But I love the way it looks. I love the geography. I love the diversity.

I don't think about the gender of my readers or about reader expectations. I'm frankly scared to. I figured out a long time ago that if I tried to guess the audience, it would be like me trying to guess which stocks to buy.

My books come to me in images, and sometimes the image is at the beginning of the book, and sometimes it's simply a flash somewhere in the middle.

At Lackland Air Force Base, they make an effort to retrain military dogs that suffer from PTSD. It's a lengthy, long process. The treatment is much the same as it would be for people, but it's a difficult road back.

Quite a few of the dogs that come back from Afghanistan or Iraq or police dogs that are involved in violent confrontations where there's gunfire can in fact exhibit the symptoms and suffer from PTSD.

Dogs give us something just as we give something to them.

When dogs fulfill their roles they are ecstatically happy.

I have these huge black foam boards on the wall, and tacked to them, I have these white punch cards with my story ideas, scenes and notes.

I really strive to bring something new to each book. I don't want to write the same book over and over again.