Quotes from Tana French

I reread a lot. I must have read 'The Once and Future King,' 'Watership Down' and Mary Renault's 'Theseus' books at least a dozen times each.

I don't really plan ahead very far. I have never known what I'm doing more than a few pages ahead.

If you rewrite a paragraph fifty times and forty-nine of them are terrible, that's fine; you only need to get it right once.

In terms of pure volume, I probably read more psychological mystery and historical true crime than anything else.

My night stand is permanently jammed with books I want to read.

Both back when I was acting and now that I'm writing, I've always wanted the same thing out of my career: to be able to get up in the morning and do what I love doing.

I like books like 'The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher,' where the investigation of a crime becomes a way into an exploration of the society where the crime took place.

Don't be scared of 'said.' Writers sometimes go looking for alternatives because they worry that 'he said' and 'she said' will feel repetitive if they're used all the time, but I swear, they won't.

We moved around a lot when I was kid. I'd lived in three continents before I was 12.

Most animals are pragmatic about mysteries: If they run across something they don't understand, all they care about is whether it's edible and whether it's dangerous. Humans, on the other hand, are drawn to the mystery for its own sake.

I'm a big admirer of Daniel Woodrell for his beautiful, precise, sparse prose - I don't do succinct well, so I'm in awe of writers who do.

I'd always been fascinated by archaeology; it was my original career plan as a kid.

If you're writing a scene for a character with whom you disagree in every way, you still need to show how that character is absolutely justified in his or her own mind, or the scene will come across as being about the author's views rather than about the character's.

I like writing about big turning points, where professional and personal lives coalesce, where the boundaries are coming down, and you're faced with a set of choices which will change life forever.

I've got this theory that human beings are innately religious; we have a belief system. It doesn't have to be a theist form, necessarily. But we need a belief system, some framework on which to hang our behavior.

In TV writing, Armando Iannucci's satire 'The Thick of It' is brilliant - equal parts hysterically funny, terrifyingly believable, and Oh-my-God-I-can't-believe-he-actually-said-that - and it's got the most satisfyingly creative insults ever.

One of my da's tragedies was always the fact that he was bright enough to understand just how comprehensively he had shat all over his life.

Your character is always right. No real person thinks they're being stupid or misguided or bigoted or evil or just plain wrong - so your characters can't, either.

It's OK to screw up. For me, this was the big revelation when I was writing my first book, 'In the Woods': I could get it wrong as many times as I needed to.

With 'Broken Harbour,' a third of the way through, I worked it out and had to go back and bloody rewrite.

You don't have to like your family, you don't even have to spend time with them, to know them right down to the bone.

When you're too close to people, when you spend too much time with them and love them too dearly, sometimes you can't see them

Donna Tartt blows me away - that impeccable writing, so rich you could eat it and so luminous that it lights up the whole room, and the way she brings her characters to life so completely and in such fine detail that you know them as intimately as your dearest friends.

When we can't see a pattern, we fit pieces together until one takes shape, because we have to.