And we live an odd way which is like the way Susan Silverman and Spenser do. We live in the same house but she lives on the second floor and I live on the first. There's no doors - we come back and forth.

On a talk show - or a chat show as they say in England - in London, a woman asked me once, "Well, are you intimate?"

And I said, "Enough to make you blush."

And, obviously, I am not quite Spenser. Well, I'm unarmed for instance. But the superficial stuff, again, I use what I know. I was in Korea, he was in Korea. I lift weights, he lifts weights. I've never been a cop, never been a private eye, never fought Joe Walcott. I don't have a close friend named Hawk.

But, you know, all writing is to some extent autobiographical because when you're working with the imagination, you don't have anything else to work with. Some kid once in a writing class said, "Is it okay to write about real life?"

And I said, "As opposed to what?"

And this is what I've got, so I make stuff out of it and I change it. There's a wonderful passage in T.S. Elliot's critical writings where he talks about the imagination. You take a bell jar, and put an inert gas in it and you add a piece of tungsten, I think it is, and it changes the gas so that the gas is not what it was. And he said, "That's the imagination." I think he was talking about poets, so he described that as the poet's imagination: that piece of tungsten that takes something and changes it so that it's something else, by being a party to it. And so all of it is filtered through my imagination. I quote people a lot because I have nothing original to say. If I would have thought of that, I would have said it.

So yes, there's a lot to be said there. Will they ever marry? Probably not, but I don't know that they won't. They seem happy the way that they are.

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