I just got an honorary degree from Glasgow University, and I had to wear around very painful shoes so that I didn't laugh all the way through the ceremony because I felt like an outlaw.

People are interested in crime fiction when they're quite distanced from crime. People in Darfur are not reading murder mysteries.

To have a very strong opinion all the time is corrosive to a person's intellect. It becomes your default position.

I think graphic novels are closer to prose than film, which is a really different form.

I'd read so much right-wing crime fiction where they find the evidence and shoot the bad guy - I thought there must be another approach.

Crime fiction is the fiction of social history. Societies get the crimes they deserve.

I think the negative traits are what makes us love other human beings, the foibles and the flaws.

None of us know what is going to sell or what people want to read.

In my heart Im just a lucky waitress.

There's a real emphasis on being witty in Scotland, even in crime novels.

I have two children. They are more fun than anything in the world, and it's more immediate fun than the hard slog of writing.

Let me be one of the people who writes their life history, not with ink, with the colors of a caring heart.

So the stories aren't just stories, is what you're saying. They're really secret knowledge disguised as stories.""One could say that of all stories, younger brother.

Ahab and aguish lay stretched together in one hammock.

Where you are is who you are. The further inside you the place moves, the more your identity is intertwined with it. Never casual, the choice of place is the choice of something you crave.

Ambition is exhausting. It makes you friends with people for the wrong reasons, just like drugs.

One of the biggest things happening in the art world is this idea of expansion. No one embodies this aspect of what art is becoming better than James Franco.

Jacks are home runs. So are dongs, bombs, and big flies. Baseball people express their fondness for a thing by thinking up lots of different ways to say it.

The role of a librarian is to make sense of the world of information. If that's not a qualification for superhero-dom, what is?

I really like sometimes to do action pictures; I get a really big kick out of doing those.

It seems like we are moving towards something, some kind of point and it is probably going to be an important point in our development or dissolution. That is what everybody seems to be thinking.