To be a writer, you must be a reader, yet as many as 30 per cent of my writing students were not readers.

Delaying and withholding tactics, red herrings, partial and doubtful outcomes are stock in trade for fiction writers, especially crime writers.

I didn’t feel that there was much goodness in me.

I wanted to be taken out of myself.

A good writer can set a thriller anywhere and make it convincing: the trick is to evoke the setting in such a way that it highlights the crime or unsettles the reader.

At one level, an award is an endorsement, a confirmation, but I always find myself looking askance at awards and good reviews, as though another Garry Disher had earned them.

I grew up in a house full of books, and we belonged to the Country Lending Service - each month the State Library would send us a parcel of books by train.

Life is too short to waste on unproductive endeavors

We have more to fear from the opinions of our friends than the bayonets of our enemies." Politician turned Union General Nathaniel Banks, in plea he couldn't abandon an untenable position.

Time has a funny way of airbrushing relationships, removing all the things that were wrong so when you look back it looks much better than it really was.

I thought marriage was something very quiet and very regular and very bourgeois.

I am not a complete vegetarian. I eat only animals that have died in their sleep.

Large sums were paid for the use of money, because the available amount of gold and silver was far less than was needed to carry on the commercial transactions of the times.

But the quality of human beings is only one - and that is how much they love and forgive.

There's no way I know, to get through the pain of a startup without belief that the mission really matters.

They should've built a city on rock and roll.

We're all ignorant, just about different stuff.