I Try to leave out...

“Elmore Leonard is one of the most influential authors in American lit in the late 20th Century.”

“I think his books more honestly represent America than anyone else I could think of.”

“For a guy who wrote about lowlifes as much as he did, it was extremely high literature.”

“I sent my dad a letter when I was in college. And he sent it back to me with corrections in red pen. And he even gave me like a C on it, you know, he marked, he graded it.”

“I was with a couple of buddies, we were listening to the new Jimi Hendrix album, and we were watching a University of Michigan football game on television. Fifteen feet away Elmore was writing Valdez Is Coming, and he was in his own world. In the zone. Later that evening he told me that he wrote eight pages that day. And I thought, how can you do this?”

“Elmore said, famously, you know, he said about the first Big Bounce, it was the second worst movie ever made. There had to be one that was worse. And then when The Big Bounce was remade, he said, I have found the worst movie ever made.”

“Very refreshing to read about characters that were very believable, that I think I may have worked with during my 20 years in the Los Angeles Police Department. The banter was real, the comradery. So very nice to read and see something that depicted police officers as just regular people. You know, we don’t have capes, we’re not super human.”

“Getting the soul of the place is a whole different thing. And Dutch is able to do that because he gets the people there and has this unstated sympathy for them, whether they’re white or black, or on the right or wrong side of the law, he has the sense of what America is. It’s sort of a hustle. And the American Dream is for other people in other places.”

“We were on the phone and he says: Otto, I’m up to page 150 and my hero’s in a barn, he just got shot and he’s dead. And he was my hero. I don’t know what to do now. I’m like; uh, rewrite that scene? And he said; no, no, no, I can’t do that, these guys do what they do.”

“His woman are smarter than the men, but what’s interesting about that is he doesn’t make it this big pause, oh she’s smarter than the man. It’s just natural, we recognize that women are smarter than men. So he’s not going to explain it to you, he’ll let you see it because we all know that that is true.”

“I loved how Elmore allowed his female characters to be women, not necessarily girls. They, they had some good experience. They had some mileage on them. They were able to stand up for themselves. They were smart. They’ve been around the block. You just couldn’t pull a fast one on these women who had already lived so much.”

“I was surprised upon his death the number of women that were fans of his. And I don’t really know why I was surprised about that, because, you know, I’m a fan, why wouldn’t other women be a fan?”

“There’s this moment in Out of Sight when Elmore Leonard has his character, Foley, say about the Joe Lewis statue, yeah, that’s named after the Brown Bomber. And then he makes this funny comment to suggest that, wow, I don’t know, Brown Bomber, can you still say that? Or is that racist? It’s prescient on Leonard’s part to write that, because he’s speaking to white angst.”

“Blacks, we speak in code to each other all the time. And we say things to each other that we never say to any other race. We have, it’s called, you know, code switching, that kind of thing. And for Elmore Leonard to capture part of the black experience, it’s so honest.”

“He was one of those people, his wit was like a papercut. You didn’t even know he had said something funny till you walk away and your hand is bleeding.”

“There are some specific lines that really struck me in Bandits. Like when the homeless man is standing outside the church. He said, they stand at the bottom of nowhere on a spring day. What more is there to say? They stand at the bottom of nowhere. And then, on a spring day, which makes it almost poignant, on a spring day, and they have nowhere to go.”

“He would sit there and sometimes if he was finishing up writing, when I’d get there, he’d actually, you’d see him like this, almost like he was conducting this imaginary symphony in his head, and then he’d pick up the pen and finish, and then he’d be happily done.”