Words matter. These are the best Donna Leon Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I don’t go to the movies because I don’t like films.
I find the idea of vigilante justice very attractive. I like the idea that the murderer decides that this person has gone too far, and nothing will happen to him unless she does something to stop him.
I admire Dickens beyond words. He is one of the greatest plotters of all times. Didn’t have a clue about women, but he sure could plot.
The Germans and Austrians are very polite, the Swiss are very reserved and the Spanish usually kiss me. The Brits write me letters.
The character I created, ‘Commissario Brunetti,’ who appears in all my books, shares similar reading, artistic and musical tastes with me. Subconsciously, I knew that if I was to spend however long it would take to write this book with him, this man would have to be someone I’d like to have dinner with.
I have no memory for what happens in what books. I don’t know when I might remember a scene, but beats me what book it’s in because there are 14 of them now.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg is the most liberal and illumined of the nine Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court.
So much of contemporary crime fiction is painful to read and obsessed with violence, particularly against women, and I can’t read that.
I never know what’s going to happen in a novel. I don’t have a plan or an outline.
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.
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 never wanted to be rich or successful or famous. I just wanted to be happy and have fun.
I have always had a particular antagonism for the military.
I do not take any pleasure whatsoever in being a famous person.
I listen to Handel’s vocal music, almost exclusively.
And I don’t want to live anywhere where I am famous. It makes me very, very uncomfortable, because it conveys an advantage over people, and I don’t like that.
I just go to lunch. And I never know when something is going into the file and something is not.
