PLAYBOY: Who are your favorite writers of dialogue?

PRICE: I would say, hands down for me, for my taste, is George Higgins. Basically, that's all he was, voices. He also had the real politics of crime and punishment down because he had been a prosecutor. But his small talk I could read until the cows come home. There are certain sections of Robert Stone and Don Delillo when they were on. They're both really good at sardonic dialogue. And that comes and goes, depending on who is talking about and what they are talking about. But they both do some great stuff, some great passages that sounded to me like dead on. There's this new guy I'm reading now, I'm in the middle of his book, Joshua Ferris. He wrote this book about life in an advertising office in Chicago. It's called And Then We Came To The End. Everybody talks about Henry Green, you know, but I've tried to read him a number of times. I can't believe I left out Denis Johnson. Tree of Smoke had the best drop-dead dialogue I've ever read. If you think about it, there are a million great dialogue writers.

PLAYBOY: And Elmore Leonard!

PRICE: Of course. That's what I'm saying. The thing I love about Elmore Leonard is: What does it say that the hippest, coolest writer in America is like 82 years old? Elmore Leonard has never written an uninteresting line of dialogue in his life.

PRICE: It's not like I'm this great paterfamilias with my kids, but when they go down there, I tell them, "Always look up." I mean you see shit at eye level and it's like this Tibetan hat boutique or a gelateria or something. Look up and you see these eroded mermaid heads and corroded mansarded roofs and stuff like that. You can still see faded writing. It's like the world's busiest ghost town. There is visual evidence everywhere. There are synagogues down there that are like holes in the wall. Your first thought when you're passing it is: Is this some defunct avant-garde theater place? But it's a functioning synagogue. And there's one down there on Norfolk Street that is so hanging on by its fingernails. They had their last circumcision there 65 years ago. But because of the influx of young people now, all of a sudden they've got people showing up. They've got young guys there for the first time. And one guy is black, another guy deals grass. You know, a third guy is like an aspiring slumlord. Fourth guy owns a supermarket. You know? And the fifth guy is a boxing writer and the sixth guy is the boxer. You got these guys rubbing elbows with the last of the abes; the guys that are like 85, 90 years old. And they're having their services and the plaster is falling on their heads. But they've got all this new blood now. I mean maybe we're talking 15, 20 young people.

There's a building down there that I heard was haunted. And I told the cops that about this place. It's an empty place on Orchard near Canal. Like right down where the lava still has yet to go a tiny bit. And I said, "Do you want to check this place out?" We went down there and it was boarded up. The place looked fucking scary. It had scorch marks on the outside of every window shooting up. It was a spooky-looking building. That's a hell of a lot of real estate not being touched. A five-story building on the Lower East Side that nobody was going near? I mean that's a lot of dough. And as we're looking at it -- all these cops have those like little high-powered flashlights, Maglites. We're standing there. It's about eleven o'clock at night and they're flash-lighting up the side of the building. And this Chinese lady -- because you know, like everywhere else, it's a billion of invisible Chinese people. She's passing by, "What you look at?" I go, "Oh, just checking this building out." She goes, "Oh, that building haunted." And she just keeps walking by.

That's the other huge culture down there is the undocumented Chinese, the Fujianese. They're like Chinese hillbillies. The Cantonese look down on them just like the German Jews look down on the Russian Jews. They all live like on East Broadway. Not in traditional Chinatown, but the more funky streets. They're bottom dogs. They get to live in the bottom. They're living just like the Jews did 100 years ago. That's what I mean. The place is still what it was. If Jacob Riis were alive right now, he would be writing about the Fujianese. They say the biggest violent crime on the Lower East Side is black and Hispanic on Chinese because the kids from the projects know that the Chinese have a language barrier. They don't trust cops, they don't talk to cops, they're undocumented and they don't trust banks. If you hit the right Chinamen, you got a guy who might be walking around with a couple hundred bucks on him. Or a couple thousand bucks because he's living 20 to an apartment, and he has no place to stash his life savings. He's carrying it around on him. It's like winning the lottery -- mugging the right Chinese guy. And, you know, the cops themselves, every time they get a Chinese victim, they go, "Oh, shit. Here we go." You know, you showing him the mug books. Faces after faces. All of which look alike to him. He's freaking out because he's in a cop station. And where he comes from, in Fujian, the cops are bad news. Any time a cop comes to you, something bad is going to happen to you. There's no such thing as service for the victim.