"The only thing that you absolutely have to know is the location of the library."

"I have always wanted to write mysteries, ever since I was a little girl growing up in rural Indiana.  We used to ride our ponies to the library and fill up the saddlebags with books, and then read up on the hayloft of the barn behind our house.  I fell in love with Hercule Poirot, Sherlock Holmes, and Nancy Drew.  And that's when I decided I wanted to either be a detective or a mystery author."

"Our social moorings aren't the only things that restrain our creative impulses. We are also limited by false aesthetics: those notions that we have developed in schools and libraries, and from listening to critics that adhere to some misplaced notion of a literary canon."

"I'm going to tell you that libraries are important. I'm going to suggest that reading fiction, that reading for pleasure, is one of the most important things one can do."

"The secret of it all, is to write in the gush, the throb, the flood, of the moment–to put things down without deliberation–without worrying about their style–without waiting for a fit time or place. I always worked that way. I took the first scrap of paper, the first doorstep, the first desk, and wrote—wrote, wrote ... By writing at the instant, the very heartbeat of life is caught." (artist)

The View from the Cheap Seats