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 have no memory for what happens in what books. I don't know when I might remember a scene, but beats me what book it's in because there are 14 of them now.

I have always had a particular antagonism for the military.

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.

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.

My head can get to murder and rape for profit because I can understand greed as a human motive, but I cannot understand the voyeuristic desire to watch such a film. I can comprehend one and I cannot comprehend the other.

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

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.

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

I admire Dickens beyond words. He is one of the greatest plotters of all times. Didn't have a clue about women, but he sure could plot.

I came to Venice for the first time in 1968 and was lucky enough to make the acquaintanceship, and then the friendship, of two Venetians, Roberta and Franco, who remain my best friends here after almost 50 years.

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

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

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 listen to Handel's vocal music, almost exclusively.

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

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

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 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.

I'm involved with a baroque opera company here in Italy. I write some of their booklet material, comments on operas. I also write for some baroque opera festivals because this music is my real passion.

Italians tend to be less rigidly moral and law-abiding than do Anglo-Saxons. They also have a profound suspicion of the state and most of its agencies.

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

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.

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

The character I created, 'Commissario Brunetti,' who appears in all my books, shares similar reading, artistic and musical tastes with me. Subconsciously, I knew that if I was to spend however long it would take to write this book with him, this man would have to be someone I'd like to have dinner with.

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

I became hooked on the idea of being able to shoot an image and process it myself, and end up with a product.

After I'd produced about two dozen pen and ink drawings, one evening I decided that they needed poems to accompany them. I still have no idea where that notion came from, but it took me about two hours to produce verses for these creatures.

Yeah, that's what kind of, we get the idea a little bit yeah, because other people from different countries also try as hard as they can to get a medal or a gold medal in the Olympic Games. And you know, if they can work hard, we can work hard as well.

What's fascinating is that when you write a script, it's almost a stream of consciousness. You have an idea that it means something, but you're not always sure what. Then when you get on the set, the actors teach you.

I also do not like the idea of soft money, these issue ads - people don't know where the money is coming from, millions and millions of dollars outside of the control of a candidate - there's no accountability.

From the beginning, the series has been story driven - I began with a story idea - but research feeds it.

Then I decided I couldn't just crawl in the corner and die, so I started putting pen to paper and wrote some songs. I had no idea what for or who I was going to work with. I tried to find my way and direction.

The idea is, if I can't heal from my art, then how can you heal?

There is sometimes a peculiar confusion in the West that equates progress to whatever is recent or whatever is new, and it is time we understood that progress has nothing to do with the chronology of an idea.

The idea of licking stamps seemed great fun for me.

Learn about the world, the way it works, any kind of science and anthropology, it's really an interesting place we live in. Evolution is a really fantastic idea, even more than the idea of God I think.

It's slightly complicated for people to grasp the idea of a head of state in human form.

As far as I know, only a small minority of mathematicians, even of those with Platonist views, accept the idea that there may be mathematical facts which are true but unknowable.

So my idea of neurotic is spending too much time trying to correct a wrong. When I feel that I'm doing that, then I snap out of it.

I'm into the idea of responsibility and edification and these things have found me and I have found them. I wanted to be in the movie and I made it known to Mike.

Religion has caused more harm than any other idea since the beginning of time. There's nothing good I can say about it. People use it as a crutch.

Many of the Europeans who want Israel to go away don't even know why they do. Nearly a third of those interviewed concede they have no idea what the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is all about. It's enough to know that Israelis are Jews.

It was an idea we had when Al was in the Senate - to organize and moderate an annual conference that would look at government policy through the lens of the family to help identify ways that the family can be supported and strengthened.

Growing up in Hollywood it seemed like every kid was the child of some star. We had no idea that other people would think we were special, because there was no other lifestyle to compare it to.

When employers tell me they prefer married men, and encourage their men to have homes of their own, because it makes them so much steadier, I wonder if they have any idea of all that that implies.

As a matter of fact they'd blacken us down. I guess there's a reason that according to what the Caucasian wanted us to look like. He wanted us to look-if we were Black, then he had his idea of what we look like.