Daniel Handler Quotes

I've been tremendously moved by a bunch of odd books. Ross McDonald is very important to me. I love the Lew Archer books.

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 wrote my graduate thesis at New York University on hard-boiled fiction from the 1930s and 1940s, so, for about two years, I read nothing but Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, James Cain and Chester Himes. I developed such a love for this kind of writing.

What brought me to the table was Raymond Chandler and, to a lesser degree, Ross Macdonald and Dashiell Hammett. I was basically inspired to want to write like the classic private-eye writers.

Ross McDonald had a greater influence on me than any other writer. His style of writing, the repeated theme of the past coming out to grab somebody, that's very attractive to me as a reader and, now, as a writer.

I not only read Raymond Chandler but read all the crime fiction classics. I was hooked.

Anyone who was tempted to draw comparisons between my father's 'Dave Robicheaux' series and my first book quickly gave up.

Very few of my books are about who stole the Maltese Falcon.

Raymond Chandler once wrote that Dashiell Hammett gave murder back to the people who really committed it.

I wrote the original Mike Hammer as a comic, Mike Danger.

I can still remember. I was ill, and I was seven, and my father didn't want me to just read children's books. He came with Conan Doyle. I tried, and I liked it. I think the first I read was 'The Sign of the Four'; 'Study in Scarlet' was the next one. Then I guess I stayed home a few extra days from school to read.

For me, Anthony Powell is a religion. I read 'A Dance to the Music of Time' every few years.

I tend not to reread books, because there's always something new to discover, but Dorothy Sayers is a comfort grab for me - there's no mood so bleak or cold so bad that Lord Peter and Bunter can't make it right.

I was about 12 when I first encountered 'The Moonstone' - or a Classics Illustrated version of it - digging through an old trunk in my grandfather's house on a rainy Bengali afternoon.

I particular enjoy the crime writer, Walter Ellis Mosley. He does a series of Chandler-esque detective stories.

I'm a big reader, so when I was in 'Pride and Prejudice,' or, like, in Poirots and Marples, those are all books that I loved, and so it was really exciting for me to inhabit characters from literature that I knew and recognized.

I've read a thousand private-eye novels.

My earliest influence was Shakespeare - I read Shakespeare incessantly as a kid.

When I was in college, there were dollar movie nights. I went to see 'The Long Goodbye,' which was based on one of Chandler's books but was contemporary and set in Los Angeles in 1973. I loved the movie, which motivated me to read the book.

When I was a kid, I loved 'Little Women.'

With 'The Big Lebowski,' we were really consciously thinking about doing a Raymond Chandler story, as much as it's about L.A.

I would say 'The Chill' by Ross Macdonald is sort of a prototypical example of how the private detective genre elevates itself to the level of literature.

I learned to write crime novels by reading people I hoped to emulate: people like James Lee Burke, Lawrence Block, Joseph Wambaugh, and Sue Grafton.

When I write about places in L.A. - like where the best taco truck is or something - it's not about L.A. To me, it's about Harry Bosch, because he's the guy that does these things and has this experience.