I think my Wallander stories give a fairly good image of the world in the 1990s. I don't regret anything about that - on the contrary!

One of the agonies of being an author is to know when to stop writing.

Police work wouldn't be possible without coffee.

Many words will be written on the wind and the sand, or end up in some obscure digital vault. But the storytelling will go on until the last human being stops listening. Then we can send the great chronicle of humanity out into the endless universe.

Although many of his other novels are brilliant there is a power in 'Oliver Twist' that I believe Dickens never managed to retrieve. It is as if he was sent to this earth with the sole purpose of writing this book.

I'm not very much of a reader really, because I find much of it very bad, very uninteresting, very speculative.

I remembered her once saying that life was like your shoes. You couldn't simply expect or imagine that your shoes would fit perfectly. Shoes that pinched your feet were a fact of life.