I never know what's going to happen in a novel. I don't have a plan or an outline.

I just go to lunch. And I never know when something is going into the file and something is not.

I have always had a particular antagonism for the military.

And off in the far distance, the gold on the wings of the angel atop the bell tower of San Marco flashed in the sun, bathing the entire city in its glistening benediction.

Venetians feel affection and loyalty to their city, rather than to the Italian state.

This is a fallen world. People lie, the truth gets distorted, and that's the way it is. What's for dinner ?

All through graduate school, instead of having a television I read murder mysteries: Hammett, Chandler, Ruth Rendell, P. D. James.

Oh, so seldom does fate cast our enemy into our hands, to do with as we will

And I don't want to live anywhere where I am famous. It makes me very, very uncomfortable, because it conveys an advantage over people, and I don't like that.

I never wanted to be rich or successful or famous. I just wanted to be happy and have fun.

So much of contemporary crime fiction is painful to read and obsessed with violence, particularly against women, and I can't read that.

Right Jo better be happy old maids than unhappy wives or unmaidenly girls running about to find husbands.

There are just some things that are outside of comprehension, even if we can quantify them. At some point, science becomes magic.

There was one less monster on earth, and the world was certainly better off without him.

Misfortunes come to all men.

When people praise you, don't let it go to your head. When they criticize you, don't let it go to your heart.

In a weird way, when everyone's feeling that the world's going to hell in a hand basket, I kind of relax a little more because I often feel like that.

Because the earth is not a product of labour it cannot have a value.

The freedom of the press is one of the great bulwarks of liberty, and can never be restrained but by despotic governments.

What keeps you from... living your life as a painful and lovely day in the history of a great pregnancy?

Commonsense lets us down, because commonsense evolved in a world where nothing moves very fast, and nothing is very small or very large; the mundane world of the familiar.