Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I don't know where my phone is half the time.
I begin each book with a challenge to myself.
it's smarter to be lucky than it's lucky to be smart.
My husband and I are both proud public school graduates.
I'm very empathetic - that might be one of my superpowers.
I'm at the age most people are sending their kids off to college.
It's very different to have this kid that I'm truly responsible for.
I've gotten to do a lot of stuff, traveled, worked hard at my career.
Fiction needs writers and readers, and writers should cultivate both.
I'm for anything that lets writers stretch, in or out of their series.
My husband, David Simon, and I make our livings using our imaginations.
Anyone can love a perfect place. Loving Baltimore takes some resilience.
Reading was not a fallback position for her but an ideal state of being.
I sometimes allow people to infer that I'm much less successful than I am.
In fact, I think every book I've written has been inspired by a real event.
how magnanimous was a gesture if one were constantly aware of its magnanimity?
The verbs that are used for people who write quickly are almost never flattering.
There was nothing more dangerous than people convinced of their own good intentions.
I love crime fiction, and I'm proud to be part of it, but I'm not without criticism for my own genre.
stinginess seemed instinctive to him. Darwinian even. He hadn't gotten to his current size by sharing.
Whatever you want, at any moment, someone else is getting it. Whatever you have, someone else is longing for.
There are, of course, an infinite number of places where one is not, yet only one place where one actually is.
I adore the work of Stephen Sondheim. I like musicales in general. They make surprisingly great running tapes.
Children can be happy when their parents are miserable. But a parent is never happier than her unhappiest child.
I'm a morning person, which is a hideous thing to be. No one likes morning people, not even other morning people.
I like to see writers reach bigger and bigger audiences, and stand-alones have allowed some of them to do just that.
My family is really, really Southern - I had two uncle Bubbas, and grandparents that we called Big Mama and Big Daddy.
There's always time to read. Don't trust a writer who doesn't read. It's like eating food prepared by a cook who doesn't eat.
Baltimore has been a punchline/punching bag for years - I've landed a few blows, to be fair - but those old jokes are out of touch.
For me, crime fiction was an opportunity to sneak up on readers with social issues, something they won't go out of their way to seek.
Reporting is pretty vital to me. It keeps me connected to the world. A 40-hour-per-week day job may be less feasible as time goes on.
Writing is a sedentary gig unless one has a treadmill desk. But I have long believed writing and working out are complementary disciplines.
I spent grades one through nine in Baltimore City, leaving for reasons that had nothing to do with the quality of education I was receiving.
My reading life is like an airport where a bunch of planes circle in a holding pattern, then - boom, boom, boom - several come in for a landing.
I think I'm part of a generation of crime writers all of whom woke up independently and recoiled with horror at the fact that we'd chosen this very conservative genre.
After I started writing crime fiction, I said to myself, 'I may be limited, but the genre's not. There's no reason to change genres if I'm happy writing what I write.' And I am.
I was part of a generation where kids had a lot of freedom and aimless downtime. I had no scheduled after-school activities. As long as you came home for dinner, everything was fine.
People still struggle with this notion of gifted writers somehow being in touch with a higher power, but it's all about showing up and doing the job, meeting deadlines, working hard.
It doesn't feel like work. Yes, I have days that are difficult, but I'm sitting in a chair making up stories. It's what I did for fun as a kid, whether with Barbies or stuffed animals.
I like books steeped in the quotidian - details about work and place. You can learn how to run a chicken-and-waffle restaurant by reading 'Mildred Pierce.' And I like fiction about money.
I've long believed that the work-out life has lessons for the writing life. I've 'solved' a lot of books while at the gym, in part because I'm not trying to solve them at that precise moment.
In my newspaper days, your endings could be literally sliced off in the composing room, so it was dangerous to get attached to them. Yet I think this has made me work harder on endings in fiction.
As for music, my tastes are eclectic. Elvis Costello is my all-time favorite. I listen to a lot of jazz, primarily the great female vocalists, and I am very fond of the late cabaret singer Nancy Lamott.
The past was worth remembering and knowing in its own right. It was not behind us, never truly behind us, but under us, holding us up, a foundation for all that was to come and everything that had ever been.
Writers who don't read can't write well. It's that simple. The more you read, the better you read, the better you'll write. The upside is that you can't read too much, and even 'junk' reading can be constructive.
If I waited to be inspired to go to the gym, I'd never get there. I schedule my exercise time; I schedule my work time. This is especially important if you have a day job as I did while writing my first seven novels.
She might not be as strong as everyone she met, or as fast, or even as smart. But she could bullshit with the best of them. Combine that quality with a license to carry, and a girl could more than get by in this life.
I never knew how passive-aggressive people could be until I became a parent. Or even aggressive-aggressive. It actually began before I had a child. A relative asked me out to lunch and told me I was too old for motherhood.
I think Baltimore suffers from nostalgia and it keeps us from being honest in talking about what really happened here. A place doesn't have to be perfect to be beloved, and I love this city and I love it better for seeing its flaws.
There's a serendipity to real life that the Internet can't duplicate. Do you use the library? For anything? Well, sometimes you end up picking up the book next to the one you were looking for, and it's that book that changes your life.