What surprised me most while writing ‘The Monogram Murders’ was that everything I needed seemed to arrive in my head exactly when I needed it.
Me
Give me odorous at sunrise a garden of beautiful flowers where I can walk undisturbed.
Everybody says love is about finding the person who is right for me and then everything will be fine. But it’s not like that. It involves work. An old man tells you this!
Can anything be stupider than that a man has the right to kill me because he lives on the other side of a river and his ruler has a quarrel with mine, though I have not quarrelled with him?
Let me just say: Peace to you, if you’re willing to fight for it.
Ever since I’ve become chairman, there have been profiles of me in People, George, The Washington Post, The Detroit News, and all of them could have been written by the same person.
It seems to me in the past it’s been a good thing, as a writer, to have experiences I hadn’t expected.
Saturn seems to have impressed the seal of melancholy on me from the beginning.
The poem ‘What Teachers Make’ is not without its detractors. This one person wrote to me and said: ‘Gee, Mr. Mali. You don’t possibly have a teacher-God complex, do you?’ And that was the first time I’d ever heard of that expression. So, yeah, I’m sure I have a teacher-God complex.
Age about 30, I stopped looking up my books in bookstores. Paying attention to the marketplace isn’t a healthy thing for me.