Donna Leon

“My father read 'The New York Times,' my mother did secretarial work, we had a dog, we had a garden, I had a brother.”

“I know you shouldn't spit in your own soup but I think most crime writing is like TV and doesn't make enormous demands on one's intellect.”

“I don't go to the movies because I don't like films.”

“Italians know about human nature - they understand human nature perhaps better than anyone else does. They know that people are weak and greedy and lazy and dishonest and they just try to make the best of it; to work around it.”

“All through graduate school, instead of having a television I read murder mysteries: Hammett, Chandler, Ruth Rendell, P. D. James.”

“The ending is one of my blackest, utterly without hope of any sort.”

“Guilo, although a lawyer, never lied; at least not to his friends.”

“Her mask gave no sign of how this affected her.”

“Ruth Bader Ginsburg is the most liberal and illumined of the nine Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court.”

“I never know what's going to happen in a novel. I don't have a plan or an outline.”

“A story begins and it always passes from the subjunctive to the declarative. And Italians don't seem to care about making a fine distinction between that which is speculation and that which is fact.”

“I do not take any pleasure whatsoever in being a famous person.”

“I came to Venice for the first time in 1968 and was lucky enough to make the acquaintanceship, and then the friendship, of two Venetians, Roberta and Franco, who remain my best friends here after almost 50 years.”

“I have always had a particular antagonism for the military.”