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

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

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.

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 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 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.