Top 35 Tess Gerritsen Quotes

I’m trained in science, believe in logic, and like to think there’s an explanation for everything. And I’m truly not really at ease with other people.

Mom and I often talked about the trip we’d someday take together to the ‘city of eternal spring’ where she was born. In Kunming, she said, the fruits are sweeter, the mountains look like Chinese paintings, and the weather is always perfect.

I was a writer first, and knew I’d be a storyteller at age seven. But since my parents are very practical, they urged me to go into a profession that would be far more secure, so I went to medical school.

I think fiction, for me, is a way of trying to understand why people do the things they do – and trying to explain what is, at heart, illogical.

I was always meant to be a writer. I’ve felt that way since I was a child.

The hunting of monsters is not for the faint of heart. Nor is it for those who feel bound by such trivial doctrines as law or national borders.

Medicine is probably one of the best backgrounds for a writer to find stories. I always think cops and docs have the best background because we see so much of human behavior, such a range of human emotions.

Alzheimer’s is literally killing us, and the only way to fight this ‘crime’ is through a groundswell of people who continue to raise their voices and funds to ensure it gets the attention it deserves.

One of the best Christmas presents I ever got was the globe that I now keep right beside my desk.

I devote most of my day to writing, and try to turn out at least four pages a day. As for what triggers the creative process, it’s a mystery to me! Characters often just walk on the page, and I wait to see what they do and say while I’m writing them.

Even if I never sold another book, I’d keep writing, because the stories are here, in my head. Stories that just need to be told. I love watching a plot unfold, and feeling the surprise when the unexpected happens.

The hardest part of writing is the first draft, and the closer you get to your deadline, the messier your workspace becomes – but that’s the same with any creative outlet.

My brother often complains to me about the ‘angry Asian male’ in the United States. As a female, I haven’t encountered this, but Asian-American men are angry. They’re angry because, for so many years, they’ve been neglected as sex symbols. Asian women have it much easier, I think; we’re accepted into various circles.

I think what medical training does is it gives you the language, the tools to look up facts. I think medical training gives you a sense of how to approach a problem, how to look at symptoms and go down the list of what it might be.

I have minor characters who are Asian-American, and I’ve been using them throughout my career, but they’ve never taken center stage, they’ve never been really powerful, they’ve never expressed some of the experiences I had growing up in the U.S. Johnny Tam is the first one.

‘Lonesome Dove’ by Larry McMurtry and ‘The Poisonwood Bible’ by Barbara Kingsolver have stuck with me throughout my life, and I think that says a lot about an author’s writing.

A project like ‘Rizzoli & Isles’ is something you can’t pursue. It’s something that comes to you… I like to call it ‘fairy dust.’ And it happened without my having to do anything.

My dad’s cooking was magic in the kitchen. But eventually over the years, his personality changed and his ability to remember recipes failed. He became paranoid and thought people were stealing from him, when often he was just misplacing things.

Because I never plan anything out ahead of time, I’m always in the process of learning about my characters. Without a biographical sketch to guide me, I discover things about my heroines as the stories unfold. Only in ‘Body Double’ did I discover that Maura’s mother was a serial killer.

Since my romance novels had all been thrillers as well, it wasn’t such a leap for me to move into the straight thriller genre. The most difficult part, I think, was being accepted as a thriller writer. Once you’ve written romance, unfortunately, critics will never stop calling you a ‘former romance author.’

My brother and I spent our childhood in movie theaters screaming. I decided early on that that was the epitome of entertainment. I’m always trying for that same level of adrenaline in my books.

Only with maturity did I come to appreciate my own Chinese roots: not just the food and the ancient history, but also the philosophy of child-rearing and the respect for education and knowledge.

There is no better test of character than when you’re tossed into crisis. That’s when we see one’s true colors shine through. So I try my best to make my characters personally involved in the plot, in a way that stresses them and tests them.

Because my dad’s Chinese-American, and they’re very concrete, he said, ‘There’s no money to be made in literature.’ So he told me to go into the sciences. And I was a good girl. And I did what Daddy said. And that’s how I ended up being a doctor. But you know, you just can’t stamp out that desire to tell stories.

The best ideas are those that really affect me emotionally – those are the ones you never forget. You think to yourself, ‘I want to write that book’, for years; those are the ideas that I love to work with, and ‘The Bone Garden’ was one of them.

For years I’ve wanted to write a book about mummies, and had been following the science of mummy CT scans when the premise for ‘The Keepsake’ occurred to me: what if an ‘ancient’ mummy turns out to have a bullet in its leg? How does a modern murder victim get turned into a mummy?

It’s what all writers dream of, that our work finds a measure of immortality that long outlives the words of any critic.

I shy away from showing cruelty on the page. A lot of the violence in my books actually happens off stage. The police come on to the scene after the event has occurred.

My most successful books, the ones that I feel the strongest about, are the ones that started with a premise that for me was deeply emotional.

I’d been writing stories since I was a child. I wrote little books for my mom and bound them myself with needle and thread. Mostly, they were about my pets.

I think of all media, television is the most powerful when it comes to selling books, because when you have a feature film, yeah, there’s a rush. But then after that month is over and the movie goes out of release, that’s it.

I raised two sons, and I know that even though they’re bigger and stronger than I am, they’re still little boys inside. They still cry, they still hurt. So whenever I write a male character, no matter how ‘heroic’ he may be, I think of my sons. And I remember that every man was once a little boy.

After twelve years of living in Hawaii, I’d gotten a serious case of ‘rock fever.’ I just couldn’t live on an island any longer.

I met my husband, Jacob, in medical school. We married and went to live in Hawaii where his family lived. It was very beautiful, but I wasn’t used to being on an island and needed wide open spaces. Eventually we moved to Maine, New England.

I was an anthropology major in college, and I’ve had a lifelong fascination with Egyptology, mummies, and all sorts of bizarre cultural practices.