I love thriller writers. My favourites are Harlan Coban, Lee Child, Ian Rankin, Kathy Reichs and Ed McBain.

I don't have ugly ducklings turning into swans in my stories. I have ugly ducklings turning into confident ducks.

I try to make my characters kind of ordinary, somebody that anybody could be. Because we've all had loves, perhaps love and loss, people can relate to my characters.

Nobody is ordinary if you know where to look.

I'm an escapist kind of writer.

Women who start out as ugly ducklings don't become beautiful swans. What they mainly become is confident ducks. They take charge of their lives.

The whole art of life is knowing the right time to say things.

Always write as if you are talking to someone. It works. Don't put on any fancy phrases or accents or things you wouldn't say in real life.

If you don't go to a dance you can never be rejected but you'll never get to dance either.

Because I saw my parents relaxing in armchairs and reading and liking it, I thought it was a peaceful grown-up thing to do, and I still think that.

We are all the heroes and heroines of our own lives. Our love stories are amazingly romantic; our losses and betrayals and disappointments are gigantic in our own minds.

The human organism is built for tension and relaxation, work and sleep. The principle of life is rhythm.

YOU have to design your own Price tag for the world.

Leisure is being allowed to do nothing.

You know, God gave me a gift to do other things besides play the game of basketball.

It's aggravating that Hollywood has never gotten credit for the role it played in promoting modern design.

Bradley Manning is an American hero.

Practice makes permanent.

Falling in love is the beginning of all wisdom, all sympathy, all compassion, all art, all religion; and in it's larger sense is the one thing in life worth doing.

When I came to North America, it was hard. It was hard to understand, hard to get someone to understand me. I only knew Russian. I studied French in school, but it didn't help. I forgot most of that.

But the time has come for journalists to acknowledge that a zone of privacy does exist.