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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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