We think of mortality so little these days... I thought of the stern Victorian determination to keep death in mind, the uncompromising tombstones. Remember, pilgrim, as you pass by, As you are now so once was I: As I am so will you be.

The thing about being a mystery writer, what marks a mystery writer out from a chick lit author or historical fiction writer, is that you always find a mystery in every situation.

I found out early that you can throw yourself away, missing what you've lost.

I had been right: freedom smelled like ozone and thunderstorms and gunpowder all at once, like snow and bonfires and cut grass, it tasted like seawater and oranges.

Don't get discouraged if you're hammering away at a sentence or a paragraph or a chapter, and it keeps coming out wrong. You're allowed to get it wrong, as many times as you need to; you only need to get it right once.

I read a lot. I always have, but in those two years I gorged myself on books with a voluptuous, almost erotic gluttony. I would go to the local library and take out as many as I could, and then lock myself in the bedsit and read solidly for a week. I went for old books, the older the better - Tolstoy, Poe, Jacobean tragedies, a dusty translation of Laclos - so that when I finally resurfaced, blinking and dazzled, it took me days to stop thinking in their cool, polished, crystalline rhythms.

I weaned myself on the nostalgia equivalent of methadone (less addictive, less obvious, less likely to make you crazy): missing what I had never had.