A good writer can set a thriller anywhere and make it convincing: the trick is to evoke the setting in such a way that it highlights the crime or unsettles the reader.

Delaying and withholding tactics, red herrings, partial and doubtful outcomes are stock in trade for fiction writers, especially crime writers.

I didn’t feel that there was much goodness in me.

I wanted to be taken out of myself.

At one level, an award is an endorsement, a confirmation, but I always find myself looking askance at awards and good reviews, as though another Garry Disher had earned them.

I grew up in a house full of books, and we belonged to the Country Lending Service - each month the State Library would send us a parcel of books by train.

To be a writer, you must be a reader, yet as many as 30 per cent of my writing students were not readers.

I’ve worked too hard and too long to let anything stand in the way of my goals. I will not let my teammates down, and I will not let myself down.

Never attribute to malevolence what is merely due to incompetence

Whited sepulchres which indeed appear beautiful outward but are within full of dead men's bones.

Now, I know a lot of things in the big man's world are not what they seem: a lot of people are out for themselves, and you can't always trust what someone says.

I love having a president who I think is smarter than I am.

Is Medicare socialism? You want to get rid of Medicare. And a lot of the people against health care do. I want to preserve it and grow it.

I love my fans very much. They give me the confidence to continue things in life.

Any committee is only as good as the most knowledgeable, determined and vigorous person on it. There must be somebody who provides the flame.

God works by contraries so that a man feels himself to be lost in the very moment when he is on the point of being saved.

And you take care, too, Shahara. Remember the lies we tell ourselves to survive seldom bring peace to our souls. (Nero)