I work in an old tradition that goes back to the ancient Greeks. You hold a mirror to crime to see what's happening in society. I could never write a crime story just for the sake of it, because I always want to talk about certain things in society.

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

I am not afraid of dying. I have lived longer than most people in the world. What scares me is to have a body that works but a brain that is waving goodbye. If that happens, I hope I die quickly.

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.

You can have more than one home. You can carry your roots with you, and decide where they grow.

The stories I create are never as awful as reality.

‎Not having time for a person, not being able to sit in silence together with somebody, that's the same as rejecting them, as being scornful about them.