I love Mikhail Bulgakov. He is very original and takes the story to unexpected places. I didn't realise political writing could be so funny.

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.

The price on money is life

Middle age: when you're sitting at home on Saturday night and the telephone rings and you hope it isn't for you.

There is nothing in which the birds differ more from man than the way in which they can build and yet leave a landscape as it was before.

Foppery, being the chronic condition of women, is not so much noticed as it is when it breaks out on the person of the male bird.

Writing history is a method of getting rid of the past.

To be honest with my music... for me to expect anyone to connect it has to come from a place of honesty.

The divinity who rules within us, forbids us to leave this world without his command.

I mean, I am still such the-good-girl. I want everybody to like me. I want everybody to be happy.

Confidence is the willingness to be as ridiculous, luminous, intelligent, and kind as you really are, without embarrassment.

We have good joint projects in the helicopter and aircraft manufacturing industry. We are considering cooperation and are actively cooperating in space. There are good prospects there [with China].