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.

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.

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

History is full of examples of slaughter and victory.

Wrinkles ? Why all the fuss ? Think of them as lines of distinction

One dead and one alone. That's how the story ends.

I've decided that I'm going to collect as many spiders in a jar as I can and then pour them all over you, William Flecter. Seeing as how it's good to face your fears.

I won my constituency. I won 55% of the white vote.

I was always a great believer in starting at the top. I really think that focusing on a career and working your way up is way way way overestimated.

We are most of us governed by epistemologies that we know to be wrong

There are so many difficult things and stories can make them palatable. That's the way I have always felt.

Listen to presences inside poems.

The mystical bond of brotherhood makes all men brothers.