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.

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'm going to own your body, Lila, because you f*cking own mine.

Eden is that old-fashioned House We dwell in every day Without suspecting our abode Until we drive away.

Superficially insignificant or accidental looking detail [in art] may well carry the most important unconscious symbolism.

Sometimes fear grips me that these fragile moments of life will fade away. It seems that I write against erasure.

I often close my eyes because I can't tolerate violence.

My mother told me to raise my kids with calculated neglect. They get their self-worth from doing what they can do and not having everything done for them.

Everything proceeds from everything else and everything becomes everything, and everything can be turned into everything else.

All of my sermons become books. I've been accused of having no unpublished thought. I encourage pastors to do that. I think there are so many great sermons that never really get circulation.

Now if you go exactly where your competitors are, you're dead.

In the practical use of our intellect, forgetting is as important as remembering.