Donna Leon Quotes

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.

I just go to lunch. And I never know when something is going into the file and something is not.

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 was at La Fenice opera house back in 1991 with friends, and we started talking about a conductor whom none of us liked. Somehow there was an escalation, and we started talking about how to kill him, where to kill him. This struck me as a good idea for a book.

I have always had a particular antagonism for the military.

I never know what's going to happen in a novel. I don't have a plan or an outline.

And off in the far distance, the gold on the wings of the angel atop the bell tower of San Marco flashed in the sun, bathing the entire city in its glistening benediction.

Venetians feel affection and loyalty to their city, rather than to the Italian state.

This is a fallen world. People lie, the truth gets distorted, and that's the way it is. What's for dinner ?

All through graduate school, instead of having a television I read murder mysteries: Hammett, Chandler, Ruth Rendell, P. D. James.

So much of contemporary crime fiction is painful to read and obsessed with violence, particularly against women, and I can't read that.

favors are always for ourselves. Especially when we ask for things for other people.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg is the most liberal and illumined of the nine Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court.

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.

Oh, so seldom does fate cast our enemy into our hands, to do with as we will

We buy things. We wear them or put them on our walls, or sit on them, but anyone who wants to can take them away from us. Or break them. ... Long after he's dead, someone else will own those stupid little boxes, and then someone after him, just as someone owned them before he did. But no one ever thinks of that: objects survive us and go on living. It's stupid to believe we own them. And it's sinful for them to be so important.

The Germans and Austrians are very polite, the Swiss are very reserved and the Spanish usually kiss me. The Brits write me letters.

I do not take any pleasure whatsoever in being a famous person.

A story begins and it always passes from the subjunctive to the declarative. And Italians don't seem to care about making a fine distinction between that which is speculation and that which is fact.

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 love music. But I've never owned a TV in my adult life, and I've never lived in a place with a television.

I never wanted to be rich or successful or famous. I just wanted to be happy and have fun.

The ending is one of my blackest, utterly without hope of any sort.

Sit around the bars, talked to people, ate in the restaurants, and chatted with the old ladies on the street. Fishermen are pretty much that way.

I don't go to the movies because I don't like films.

My father read 'The New York Times,' my mother did secretarial work, we had a dog, we had a garden, I had a brother.

I was extraordinarily lucky. I wrote a book because I wanted to see if I could write a mystery. Someone nagged me into sending it to a contest, which it won, after which I was offered a two-book contract, thus requiring the writing of a second book.