Donna Leon Quotes

I know you shouldn't spit in your own soup but I think most crime writing is like TV and doesn't make enormous demands on one's intellect.

I love music. But I've never owned a TV in my adult life, and I've never lived in a place with a television.

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

The Germans and Austrians are very polite, the Swiss are very reserved and the Spanish usually kiss me. The Brits write me letters.

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

The ending is one of my blackest, utterly without hope of any sort.

favors are always for ourselves. Especially when we ask for things for other people.

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

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.

I was at La Fenice opera house back in 1991 with friends, and we started talking about a conductor whom none of us liked. Somehow there was an escalation, and we started talking about how to kill him, where to kill him. This struck me as a good idea for a book.

I don't go to the movies because I don't like films.

I do not take any pleasure whatsoever in being a famous person.

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

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

A story begins and it always passes from the subjunctive to the declarative. And Italians don't seem to care about making a fine distinction between that which is speculation and that which is fact.

I find the idea of vigilante justice very attractive. I like the idea that the murderer decides that this person has gone too far, and nothing will happen to him unless she does something to stop him.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg is the most liberal and illumined of the nine Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court.

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

I was extraordinarily lucky. I wrote a book because I wanted to see if I could write a mystery. Someone nagged me into sending it to a contest, which it won, after which I was offered a two-book contract, thus requiring the writing of a second book.

My father read 'The New York Times,' my mother did secretarial work, we had a dog, we had a garden, I had a brother.

Italians know about human nature - they understand human nature perhaps better than anyone else does. They know that people are weak and greedy and lazy and dishonest and they just try to make the best of it; to work around it.

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

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 have always had a particular antagonism for the military.

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