But this is what I know about people getting ready to walk of the edge of their own lives: they want someone to know how they got there. Maybe they want to know that when they dissolve into earth and water, that last fragment will be saved, held in some corner of someone's mind; or maybe all they want is a chance to dump it pulsing and bloody into someone else's hands, so it won't weigh them down on the journey. They want to leave their stories behind. No one in all the world knows that better than I do.

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

Both back when I was acting and now that I'm writing, I've always wanted the same thing out of my career: to be able to get up in the morning and do what I love doing.

People need a moral code, to help them make decisions. All this bio-yogurt virtue and financial self-righteousness are just filling the gap in the market. But the problem is that it's all backwards. It's not that you do the right thing and hope it pays off; the morally right thing is by definition the thing that gives the biggest payoff.

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.

Everyone else we knew growing up is the same: image of their parents, no matter how loud they told themselves they'd be different