Laura Lippman

“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.”

“Edward Eager wrote a series of children's books that are in danger of being forgotten. But they're divine: stories about ordinary kids who stumble on magical things - a coin, a lake, a book, a thyme garden, a well. The magic changes them, they try to change the magic, the magic moves on.”

“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.”

“It was as if his fingers knew things, but they couldn't show him unless they were moving, touching. He had to think it was similar for carpenters and writers, and he knew it was the same for chefs.”

“It must be nice to be so strong and to think it's because you're so good, that you live right and eat right, so you deserve your health and happiness. But there is such a thing as luck, and there's more bad luck than good in this world.”

“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.”

“I'm very empathetic - that might be one of my superpowers.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I love crime fiction, and I'm proud to be part of it, but I'm not without criticism for my own genre.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Every person you meet has a story.”

“I don't know where my phone is half the time.”

“Anyone can love a perfect place. Loving Baltimore takes some resilience.”

“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.”

“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.”

“The verbs that are used for people who write quickly are almost never flattering.”

“Reading was not a fallback position for her but an ideal state of being.”

“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.”