To have a very strong opinion all the time is corrosive to a person's intellect. It becomes your default position.

People are interested in crime fiction when they're quite distanced from crime. People in Darfur are not reading murder mysteries.

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.

Journalism is a Darwinian process.

Everyone comes into your life to give you something even if it might as if he/she is taking something from you.

Now he found out a new thing--namely, that to promise not to do a thing is the surest way in the world to make a body want to go and do that very thing.

I'm forty-two, " he said. "That's eighty-four in musician years.

I have spent many years holding so tightly to things - wants, desires, etc. - but inevitably, they or something even better only arrives when I release the grasp.

If you're powerful enough you can even determine whom you will meet and whom you will avoid long before you meet them.

A garden is half made when it is well planned.

Behind every dark cloud there's usually rain

Politics are important but your soul lasts forever. So, you know, you make ... decisions on what you think is right or wrong and then you just go forward.

It is not righteousness to outrage A brave man dead, not even though you hate him.

I used to describe myself as a comic novelist, but my concerns seem to have darkened over the past few years.