Donna Leon Quotes

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Though everyone in the bar knew who he was, no one asked him about the death, though one old man did rustle his newspaper suggestively.

She became his Ariadne, leading him through the labyrinth of books, stopping now and then to pass another one to him.

Most people — however much they might deny it — had an idea of what they were getting into when they got into it.

Her mask gave no sign of how this affected her.

Perception of personal danger very often set people on the path of virtue.