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.

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.

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.

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.

We are losing our common vocabulary, built over thousands of years to help and delight and instruct us, for the sake of what we take to be the new technology's virtues.

Any thought that you don’t control has the power to become toxic.

If you can't get your songs to people one way, you have to find another.

Civil war was not a mere strife for territory and dominion, but a contest of civilization against barbarism.

I love kids. It's amazing that I have the opportunity to hang out with my stepson all the time.

Anything that is within you is a gift. To be able to take possession of that and say, "Whatever it is, I am bigger than it," is to learn to cherish even the hard and painful things.

However, if I ever were in a position to choose who would play me, I think I'd choose Johnny Depp.

Why is composing symphonies tough? I don't know. It's just very few people in the world can do it well. And I think that's the case with upfront design. It is very hard to do well.

I think when you get on with the actors that you're working with, even if you do have really intimate scenes, as long as you get on well, and have a bit of a laugh while doing it, then it's fine.

'E.T.' began with me trying to write a story about my parents' divorce.