I wanted to be taken out of myself.

Delaying and withholding tactics, red herrings, partial and doubtful outcomes are stock in trade for fiction writers, especially crime writers.

I didn’t feel that there was much goodness in me.

A good writer can set a thriller anywhere and make it convincing: the trick is to evoke the setting in such a way that it highlights the crime or unsettles the reader.

At one level, an award is an endorsement, a confirmation, but I always find myself looking askance at awards and good reviews, as though another Garry Disher had earned them.

I grew up in a house full of books, and we belonged to the Country Lending Service - each month the State Library would send us a parcel of books by train.

To be a writer, you must be a reader, yet as many as 30 per cent of my writing students were not readers.

We [artists] aren't people, not the way most people are. We're just...carriers. Little boats bringing goods from foreign lands.

I try not to put messages in my songs. My only message is man's communication with his fellow man. I want to narrow the gap of strangeness and alienation.

For example, computer defends well, but for humans its is harder to defend than attack, particularly with the modern time control.

I got more guts than brains, and that's my problem.

Today's my wedding day, Mom," he said softly aloud. "I'm marrying the woman I always told you I would someday.

The pleasure we feel in criticizing robs us from being moved by very beautiful things.

There's no question that Roberts will vote like William Rehnquist... If he swings, it will be from right to far right.

We envy people we love for being always in their own loved company.

Weddings seem to be magnets for mishap and for whatever craziness lurks in family closets. In more ways than one, weddings bring out the ding-dong on everybody involved.

There are, always and only, the bad people, but some of them are on opposite sides.