Lisa Unger

“I love a big, character-rich story with a dark heart, with a compelling mystery or some kind of ticking clock at its center. I want to be lured in by prose, captured by character, and bound by stellar plotting to keep turning the pages.”

“I've always had this in a kind of worst-case dark imagination. I want to know what the dark form in the window is. I want to know what the noise under the staircase is.”

“I live for the blank page.”

“'In Cold Blood' is not a thriller at all, really. It is, however, the first work of its kind: a true crime book that reads like fiction.”

“Everything is autobiographical, and nothing is autobiographical. That's fiction.”

“The truth has not so much set us free as it has ripped away a carefully constructed facade, leaving us naked to begin again.”

“Many people believe that evil is the presence of something. I think it's the absence of something.”

“Publishing is a business of relationships. The relationships you make at one house can carry over to another.”

“It's strange how memory gets twisted and pulled like taffy in its retelling, how a single event can mean something different to everyone present.”

“The business of writing a novel is a long, meandering road into the self, into the imagination. And it's a road the writer travels alone.”