Top 25 Chelsea Cain Quotes

As a seven-year-old, I remember when Etan Patz disappeared and was immortalized as the first missing-child face on a milk carton.

I was obsessed with Val McDermid’s Tony Hill and Carol Jordan books, delightfully twisted stuff.

I love to write just about more than anything, but there are times I have to force myself to sit down and work. I want to play with my daughter or watch a movie with my husband or go outside on the nicest day of the year. But if writing is going to be your job, you have to treat it like a job.

I’ve written books for awhile, but always on a pretty small scale and always pretty self-indulgent. I chose projects that I thought would be really fun to work on and found friends to work on them with me, and it was all about the process.

I felt like I’d culturally arrived when a character on the HBO show ‘True Blood’ was reading a hardback of ‘Heartsick’ at Sookie’s kitchen table.

I think of it as the lasagna approach to writing because I’m always adding layers. I’ll sometimes do it layer by layer, with dialogue, attribution, action, objects in the scene, setting… It can be sometimes that delineated.

Often we don’t even know what we think ourselves about people in our lives.

Worst part of being a writer: having to tell my toddler that I can’t play with her because I’m working. Keep in mind that working consists of me at home with a laptop on my lap sitting on the couch. It doesn’t look like working. I don’t have a hammer or anything.

Of the paperbacks that you see at the airport, I am the most violent woman writer.

Don’t let your characters tell you what to do. They can be pushy. Some writers say that they create characters and then just sort of follow them around through the narrative. I think that these writers are out of their minds.

I guess people might be surprised to know I read comic books. I’m a Marvel girl, as opposed to DC.

I often keep my eyes open for bodies. I do. Ever since I was a kid. I think I read too many ‘Nancy Drew’ books.

I was pregnant with my daughter when I started writing my first thriller, so I guess you could blame hormones.

I read a lot of ‘Nancy Drew’ books as a kid and considered myself a bit of an amateur detective.

No matter what fabulous place I visit, I don’t feel like I’m on vacation unless I’m dehydrated and covered with sunscreen.

I’m a sucker for a screwed-up protagonist. We all have issues.

Somehow, having an office that I had to go to made me want to work from home, which is easier to do if you don’t have a boss waiting for you at the office, even a very blue office.

I was a library rat and a bookworm. I read all the time. I walked to school reading books. I read under my desk.

I’d lived in Portland on and off for a decade before I’d even heard of Vanport. It was this town of 20,000 people that washed away from north Portland.

My husband and I were excited about having a kid – it was having a baby that had us worried. We had a lot to learn, so like good liberal arts graduates, we signed up for a class.

I’m usually too shy to write on planes because I assume that everyone on board is as nosy as I am and will look over my shoulder and read what I’m writing.

I know that there’s a cultural expectation that women be nurturing, delicate flowers. And I am. So delicate. But that doesn’t mean I can’t write a good, gory murder scene.

I grew up in Washington State and then eventually found my way back to Iowa City for grad school.

I have traveled a fair amount, and I have visited some great cities. I love architecture and museums and castles and ruins and central markets and even double-decker bus tours. But, I am a sucker for a tropical beach.

When I say that I went to grad school in Iowa City, people often assume that I went to the famed writers’ workshop MFA program at the University of Iowa. I didn’t. I got a master’s in journalism.