I spent 10 years as a marketing manager. I've found my experience in the financial world invaluable background for writing about white-collar crimes.

Capo, my first golden retriever, so loved to swim she once jumped off a cliff to get into Lake Superior.

I have a friend who lives in the South Side of Chicago. I helped out at a church charity there where they try to give a bit of cohesion to a desperate area. Everyone was very welcoming.

I live and die with the Chicago Cubs.

No agent wants to see a book until he or she has decided whether to pursue the relationship.

I love to sing. I'm a soprano.

The best source for finding an agent is called Literary Agents of North America. It's a complete list of agents, not only by name and address, but by type of book they represent and by what their submission criteria are.

I thought it was time for a tough, smart, likable female private investigator, and that's how VI came to life.

Reviewers said Ghost Country was rich, astonishing and affecting in the way it blended comedy, magic, and a gritty urban realism in a breathtaking ride along Chicago's mean streets.

I realised I'd never climb Everest but thought I could still write a book.

Around the time I turned 30, I wanted to publish a novel.

Write what you care about.

I'm a daydreamer.

The crime novel has always been my favourite genre.

My parents were liberal intellectuals but even they expected me to stay at home and look after my younger siblings and do the housework.

I grew up in conservative rural Kansas in the 1950s when it was expected that girls would not have a life outside the home, so educating them was a waste of time.

I spent 10 years as a marketing manager. I've found my experience in the financial world invaluable background for writing about white-collar crimes.

It took me nine months to write 60 pages. It was very frustrating.

I went to college at the University of Kansas, where I got a degree in political science.

Sometimes I think I'm a one-trick pony because I'm not very inventive about new ways of telling stories.

I'm a grandmother, and a mighty proud one.

Sisters in Crime now has more than 4,000 members worldwide.

I always wrote; my first story was published in the magazine The American Girl when I was 11.

Most people don't have the money to spend on advertising to create awareness among readers, nor do they have the contacts at newspapers or magazines to get their books reviewed.

I'm very honoured that there is a loyal following and I hope it continues.

Sometimes I panic and think I can't really write.

White-collar crime gets more outrageous by the second in America.

I'm lucky in having found the perfect partner to spend my life with.

I had wanted to write Ghost Country for a long time, but it wouldn't work.

The possibility of bringing white-collar criminals to justice is ever receding over the horizon.

People have less privacy and are crammed together in cities, but in the wide open spaces they secretly keep tabs on each other a lot more.

I wish I could remember where I put things. I spend half my life looking for my keys. With the other half I look for my glasses.

You get weird and unsettling behaviour in the country.

In 1986 we were trying to help women get in print, stay in print, and come to the attention of booksellers and libraries. At that time, books by men mystery writers were reviewed seven times as often as books by women.

Live disasters are wonderful attractions when youre safe on the other side of them.

When you feel lousy, puppy therapy is indicated.

You learn from a conglomeration of the incredible past - whatever experience gotten in any way whatsoever.

I've danced one time in my life. It was the most mortifying experience I ever had.

The experience of life consists of the experience which the spirit has of itself in matter and as matter, in mind and as mind, in emotion, as emotion, etc.

My best film composing experience was with Elia Kazan.

Education is a private matter between the person and the world of knowledge and experience, and has little to do with school or college.

A novel should be an experience and convey an emotional truth rather than arguments.

By experience we find out a short way by a long wandering.

The experience of democracy is like the experience of life itself-always changing, infinite in its variety, sometimes turbulent and all the more valuable for having been tested by adversity.

Learning teacheth more in one year than experience in twenty.

Well, the hardest thing to do, as we know from our own experience on 9/11 is protect everything all the time.

The most important training, though, is to experience life as a writer, questioning everything, inventing multiple explanations for everything. If you do that, all the other things will come; if you don't, there's no hope for you.

When I reached adulthood, even now, I could afford to belong to a country club. But I could never belong to a private club because of my experience as a child, because it would isolate me from the whole of humanity.

No one I know of has ever had this experience-where you had to sit and wait and wait for a DNA test to come back just so you can write the last page of the book.