Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I think of myself as a fairly logical, scientific and somewhat reserved person. Maura Isles, the Boston medical examiner who appears in five of my books, is me. Almost everything I use in describing her, from her taste in wine to her biographical data, is taken from my own family. Except I don't have a serial killer as a mother!
When you're drawing something, you kind of run a movie in your head. You might close your eyes or stare into the distance and kind of see a movie unfolding and, you know, grab a certain moment or think, 'Oh, yeah, that's when we need just the point that he appears around the corner but just as she's getting into the car,' you know?
I wake up at 4:15 A.M., get some coffee, turn on the news, see what's happening, go clickety-clack on the web to see what I missed overnight. Then I go to the gym, around 5:15, and I do what appears to be a very light workout, but who cares. I'm socializing with other nice people at the gym. Then I go into work, and I'm really awake.
The term 'epitaph' itself means 'something to be spoken at a burial or engraved upon a tomb.' When an epitaph is a poem written for a tomb, and appears in a book, we are aware that we are not reading it in its proper form: we are reading a reproduction. The original of the epitaph is the tomb itself, with its words cut into the stone.
I have always had a strange relationship to Portland, Oregon. It's a great city. The people who live there love it openly and loudly, and it regularly appears on the lists of best American cities. But something has always felt weird to me about Portland. And not in the way Portlanders mean 'weird' in their slogan 'Keep Portland weird.'
