When I started to write culinary mysteries, I did it because nobody was doing it anymore.

I'm always astonished to see how badly people can behave when they think no one is noticing.

In a mystery, the sleuth must be believably involved and emotionally invested in solving the crime.

I like cream cheese in just about anything.

After I outlined 'Catering to Nobody,' I went and worked for a caterer. And the other thing I had to do was to talk to the Jefferson County Sheriff's Department about how they investigated a crime.

I wanted to be a literary writer, so I wrote story after story and sent them to 'The New Yorker.'

One thing that improved my cooking skills was being a poor student in California... If you don't have much money, you have to learn to cook.

What one's goal should be is just to become a better writer and to tell different kinds of stories.

I told the caterer I'd work for nothing if he'd teach me about catering. I lasted one week full-time. It was exhausting.

Catering is extremely demanding financially and physically. It's a business.

Writing is work and cooking is relaxing.

Love a girl and she will give you a story to tell, Love a woman and she will give you a novel to pen...

I've written six novels and four pieces of nonfiction, so I don't really have a genre these days.

Osama bin Laden's own words stated he has a war against the United States. He declared that American civilians should be considered as combatants.

I believed that I was being forced to sacrifice my family and my career in defense of the Communist Party, from which I had long been separated and which I had grown to dislike and distrust.

Wish that everything should come about just as it does.

When I think about actors I know, I'd much rather hear about who they're shagging than what film they're doing next.

Don't believe in imagining things different from what they really are. When the Lord puts us in certain circumstances He doesn't mean for us to imagine them away.

In a cabinet of natural history, we become sensible of a certain occult recognition and sympathy in regard to the most unwieldy and eccentric forms of beast, fish, and insect.

Norman Bates heard the noise and a shock went through him.

Among us, what is not allowed to women is equally not allowed to men.