Kerry Greenwood

“If I ever saw my muse she would be an old woman with a tight bun and spectacles poking me in the middle of the back and growling, "Wake up and write the book!”

“I think it is rather heroic to go into a war zone where everyone is trying to kill you, and you have no way of shooting back.”

“The stories from World War I are worse than anything I have ever read.”

“I used to tell my three younger siblings stories because that was my household chore, and I told long stories in installments because it was easier and more fun than making up a new story every night. I loved it.”

“I don't steal stories. If I'm a plagiarist, so is Hitchcock. And Tolkien. And Shakespeare.”

“I have been reading crime books ever since I was a child, but I had never tried to write one.”

“I decided that if I want to write about a female hero in the 1920s, I'm going to have to give her all the advantages I can because she has serious disadvantages in being a woman. I wasn't going to have her cowed or overawed by class, so she had to be titled.”

“When I first started writing the books in the 1980s, all of the female detectives were flawed in some way because they were based on noir characters.”

“Unanswered questions make my head itch.”

“A publisher saw one of my historical novels and thought I would write an admirable detective story, so she offered me a two-book contract, and I grabbed it.”

“I've always been in love with Melbourne. When I was 12, I was taken into the city by my grandmother to go to the ballet for the first time.”

“Most detective story readers are an educated audience and know there are only a certain number of plots. The interest lies in what the writer does with them.”

“I was determined to become a criminal lawyer and help look after the poor.”

“I don't think the process of writing books is in any way sensible. It's not logical, and it's not reasonable. I do write very fast, and I just do it in a binge. Other people binge-drink; I binge-write.”

“I have to write three books a year to make a reasonable living out of writing - unless, of course, she gets a major American film deal. Phryne has been optioned since the very first book, but to make a historical TV movie, it costs $30,000 a day extra for the historical detail to be correct, so most people aren't doing it.”

“The Albion was a spacious pub, built in the days when a public house with any pretensions to gentility had to have fourteen foot ceilings, brass taps and a polished wooden bar you skate down. ... Bert, in his reflective moments, considered that if heaven didn't have a well-appointed pub where a man could sit down over a beer for a yarn with the other angels, then he didn't want to go there.”

“First, a bath. I'm feeling soiled. Too much contact with cold reality, I think.”

“I didn't want to write a grown-up account of Gallipoli. I wanted to find out what would happen if I looked at Gallipoli through the eyes of an innocent.”

“You need a crime, a detective, and the solution.”

“If you look at the map, there's Thrace, Greece, Bulgaria, and there's tiny Gallipoli. It is such a small part of the whole peninsula, and yet you only hear about this little tiny bit.”