I am, of course, romanticizing; a chronic tendency of mine.
With acting, you have to depend on somebody else to decide if you are allowed to work. You can spend weeks and months when you are not acting at all.
I hate nostalgia, it’s laziness with prettier accessories...
Here’s a little tip for you. If you don’t like being called a murderer, don’t kill people.
Don’t you ever feel that – that you just need to get away? From everything? That it’s all too much?
You don’t have to like your family, you don’t even have to spend time with them, to know them right down to the bone.
Sarte was right, Hell is other people.
I have always been caught by the pull of the unremarkable, by the easily missed, infinitely nourishing beauty of the mundane.
I came from a house full of books, so I took reading for granted. I was an outdoorsy little kid, too, so I got the best of both worlds by taking books up trees and reading there.
I like writing about big turning points, where professional and personal lives coalesce, where the boundaries are coming down, and you’re faced with a set of choices which will change life forever.
I thought I could never write a proper book; I’d never done it before. But I thought I could write a sequence. Then I had a chapter. The next thing I knew I was turning acting down.
I’m still very much in the apprentice stage of writing. I read somewhere that you need to write a million words before you know what you’re doing – so I’m headed that way, but I’m nowhere near there.
I’ve got this theory that human beings are innately religious; we have a belief system. It doesn’t have to be a theist form, necessarily. But we need a belief system, some framework on which to hang our behavior.
If you’re writing a scene for a character with whom you disagree in every way, you still need to show how that character is absolutely justified in his or her own mind, or the scene will come across as being about the author’s views rather than about the character’s.
The thing about being a mystery writer, what marks a mystery writer out from a chick lit author or historical fiction writer, is that you always find a mystery in every situation.
When I was acting, I got trained in creating a character as a three-dimensional person. If you’re doing it right you should be able to draw an audience into the character’s world and make them feel their fears.
When we can’t see a pattern, we fit pieces together until one takes shape, because we have to.
I used to think I sewed us together at the edges with my own hands, pulled the stitches tight and I could unpick them any time I wanted. Now I think it always ran deeper than that and farther, underground; out of sight and way beyond my control.
One of my da’s tragedies was always the fact that he was bright enough to understand just how comprehensively he had shat all over his life.
When you’re too close to people, when you spend too much time with them and love them too dearly, sometimes you can’t see them.