Elmore Leonard

ELMORE LEONARD

Current Residence: Bloomfield Village, MI
Education: University of Detroit, Ph.D., 1950.
Influences, Interests and Interesting Tidbits: Ernest Hemingway, John O'Hara, John Steinbeck

I became a stylist by intentionally avoiding style, When I go back and edit and something that sounds like writing, I rewrite it. I rewrite constantly, four pages in the basket for every one that survives.
-Elmore Leonard, Los Angeles Times Book Review, August 8, 1991

But she was kissing him again, brushing his mouth with her lips, murmuring then, close to him. "Vincent, there's something I have to tell you." He waited and she said, "You know the bullet they took out of your butt?" He said, "Oh no, you better not tell me." "I have to," Linda said. "It was from your gun, not Teddy's. . . I shot you, Vincent." "You didn't mean to." "No, but I shot you. I want you to understand, it wasn't to get you to stay." Vincent said, "Oh." He said, "Are you sure."
-Elmore Leonard, Glitz

Book by book, the tireless and ingenious genre novelist Elmore Leonard is painting an intimate, precise, funny, frightening, and irresistible mural of the American underworldE Leonard treats [his characters] with the understanding and the detailed attention that Jane Austen gives her Darcys and Emma Woodhouses.
-Whitney Balliett, The New Yorker, September 3, 1990