Top 35 Lisa Lutz Quotes

I loved writing the Spellman novels, but I never had any plan to only write in one genre.

I wouldn’t say that my family is normal.

I worked for a private investigative agency briefly. I rarely had the opportunity to snoop.

Hair color is the easiest way to change your appearance, but a bad dye job might draw more attention to you.

I could never really choose a favorite book, but whenever I’m asked what my favorite movie is, I always say ‘Withnail & I,’ a British film from 1987. It’s funny and sad and absolutely gorgeous to look at. It’s the film I can watch over and over again.

While I had no intention of ending the series after ‘The Spellmans Strike Again,’ I did close many doors in that book and, with the fifth one, I was opening a lot of doors and not finding anything behind them and then opening another door and another until I found something. It was a while before I found my stride.

I have certain rules for snooping, under which anything out in the open is fair game. But I also think, in light of some current trends in our culture, that privacy should be respected.

I was never obsessed with being adopted. I was simply curious about my biological parents.

There’s no reason why a writer shouldn’t explore and use different genres.

I don’t feel like I’m a writer who works under any influence.

I wrote my first screenplay on a lark, because it was a storytelling format that felt like a familiar shorthand – we all watch movies, don’t we? But even though I grew up in Los Angeles, my family was entirely unconnected with the movie industry, and I never truly believed that it would one day be my fate.

‘The Chosen,’ if you recall, was based on the Chaim Potok novel and featured Robbie Benson’s persuasive performance as a Hasidic Jew.

You can’t be suspicious 24/7. It’s too exhausting.

I’ve got no business giving advice to anyone. Even a fictional character.

Maggie is my sister-in-law, married to my brother David. She is a defense attorney who devotes 25 percent of her practice to pro bono wrongful-incarceration cases.

I didn’t feel a strong bond with the parents who raised me, and I had anything but a happy childhood. My mother was overly sensitive; my father, ascetic. I was neither. I felt as if I were living with complete strangers. I suspect that my parents felt the same way.

I love ‘The Wire’. I can’t think of a television show that I think is superior to it in any way. I was obsessed with it from the moment it came on the air. I do also love ‘Doctor Who’ and ‘Get Smart’.

I liked the idea of exposing the beams in collaborative novel. And there are many – especially in the crime world – there are many people working together: James Patterson and his stable of sub authors; and then there are like Ken Bruen and Reed Farrel Coleman and Jason Starr.

I am a huge Mel Brooks fan. And I do think that not seeing his canon of classics is a bit criminal or clueless.

If I were one of the three viable presidential candidates, I doubt I’d be too broken up about someone looking into my passport file. Go ahead look, I’d say. It’s the passport photo I wouldn’t want anyone getting his hands on.

Years ago, when my attempts at a writing career came to a complete stand-still, I applied to the Los Angeles Police Department. This might seem odd for a liberal woman who once went to UC Santa Cruz, but I’ve always had a powerful fascination with crime and serious interest in finding different ways to contend with it.

Humor is the only way to tell a story. Especially the dark ones.

Band I listen to most: The Ramones.

I learned how to cross-country ski.

We’re all amateur investigators. We scan bookshelves, we ogle trinkets left out in the open, we calculate the cost of furniture and study the photographs on display; sometimes we even check out the medicine cabinet.

I was on a few surveillance jobs as part of a big team. I would be the person to follow the subject on foot when the need arose. But most of the time, we were sitting in a car doing nothing.

The sense of not knowing where I came from let me be as smart as I wanted to be.

I usually have a sense of where my characters are personally and ways in which they might transform throughout the novel. But I never know at the outset how the book will end, nor do I ever stick to my original plan.

I have a love/hate relationship with jogging.

I have certain rules for snooping, under which anything out in the open is fair game.

I wrote the first draft of ‘Plan B’ the summer after I turned 21.

I’d like to think that if I were in prison for a crime I didn’t commit, someone would be trying to get me the hell out of there.

My writing process is chaos. I usually start with an overarching theme. Then I establish several story threads, but I don’t outline. I just start writing and keep notes for what may come. It’s an organic process that’s usually pretty flexible.

For more than three months, I had been president and primary owner of Spellman Investigations, and I can say with complete certainty that I had more power in this office as an underling. My title, it seemed, was purely decorative. I was captain of an unfashionable and sinking ship.

If you’re trying to hide, avoid using your own name. Have a couple spares that you can pull out of your pocket anytime, the more thoroughly documented the better.