Quotes from Donna Leon

I have always had a particular antagonism for the military.

I listen to Handel's vocal music, almost exclusively.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg is the most liberal and illumined of the nine Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court.

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

And I don't want to live anywhere where I am famous. It makes me very, very uncomfortable, because it conveys an advantage over people, and I don't like that.

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.

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.

And off in the far distance, the gold on the wings of the angel atop the bell tower of San Marco flashed in the sun, bathing the entire city in its glistening benediction.

Though he did not believe, he was not untouched by the magic of belief ...

He hesitated then, anticipating the panic that came when there was nothing left to read

Oh, so seldom does fate cast our enemy into our hands, to do with as we will

His clothing marked him as Italian. The cadence of his speech announced that he was Venetian. His eyes were all policeman.

We buy things. We wear them or put them on our walls, or sit on them, but anyone who wants to can take them away from us. Or break them. ... Long after he's dead, someone else will own those stupid little boxes, and then someone after him, just as someone owned them before he did. But no one ever thinks of that: objects survive us and go on living. It's stupid to believe we own them. And it's sinful for them to be so important.

Why are other people's prejudices so strange, while our own are so thought-out and reasonable?

How beautiful, the grace of women; how soft their charity.

And will knowing what she reads make you know who she is?" "Can you think of a better way to tell?

Vianello had the knack of getting people to talk. Especially if they were Venetians, the people he interviewed invariably warmed to this large, sweet-tempered man who gave every appearance of speaking Italian reluctantly, who was only too glad to lapse into their common dialect, a linguistic change that often carried its speakers along to unconscious revelation.