Most of the people who write to me are really clever, really engaged. They just want to say that they have read my book and liked it.

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.

Death is alive, they whispered. Death lives inside life, as bones dance within the body. Yesterday is within today. Yesterday never dies.

I don't read such boring things. Life is too short.

A true friend is not the one you share laughter with. But the one you share laughter and sorrow with.

She was broken. She was useless. She was the pointless half of a friendship. The one who would live forever in shadows, no matter what she did. No matter whom she fought.

When an idea is too weak to support a simple statement it is a sign that it should be rejected.

The bomber will always get through. The only defense is in offense, which means that you have to kill more women and children more quickly that the enemy if you want to save yourselves.

To split yourself in two is just the most radical thing you can do

You must reach inside yourselves where I live like a story, not old, not young laughing at my own sorrow, weeping pearls at weddings, wielding a torch to melt sand into something clear and bright.

I want to find someone on the earth so intelligent that he welcomes opinions which he condemns.

It's quite difficult to write about photography as a photographer. A lot of better photographers than me have declined to do it.