Write what you need to write, not what is currently popular or what you think will sell.

Children live in occupied territory. The brave and the foolhardy openly rebel against authority, whether harsh or benign. But most tread warily, outwardly accommodating themselves to alien mores and edicts while living in secret their iconoclastic and subversive lives.

Read widely and with discrimination. Bad writing is contagious.

He didn't want her; he wanted me. Well, you know how it is." Dalgliesh did know. This, after all, was the commonest, the most banal of personal tragedies. You loved someone. They didn't love you. Worse still, in defiance of their own best interests and to the destruction of your peace, they loved another. What would half the world's poets and novelists do without this universal tragicomedy?

I don't want anyone to look to me, not for protection, not for happiness, not for love, not for anything.

you'd like the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. That must be the most futile oath anyone ever swears.

Crime fiction confirms our belief, despite some evidence to the contrary, that we live in a rational, comprehensible, and moral universe.