Quotes from Donna Leon

Why was it that, when children loved you, you knew everything, and when they were angry with you, you knew nothing? Commissario Guido Brunetti

Though everyone in the bar knew who he was, no one asked him about the death, though one old man did rustle his newspaper suggestively.

She believed that books served as a mirror of the person who accumulated them.

I read books, not minds, Guido.

Most people — however much they might deny it — had an idea of what they were getting into when they got into it.

Perception of personal danger very often set people on the path of virtue.

Her mask gave no sign of how this affected her.

You really love to gossip, don't you?" he asked, wishing she had brought him a glass of wine. "Yes, I suppose I do," she answered, sounding surprised at the realization. "You think that's why I love reading novels so much?

I think reading a translation is an act of faith.

Italian to the core, he did not for an instant doubt that a man could be passionately devoted to the wife he betrayed with other women.

Once, walking with him, Paola had stopped and asked him what he was thinking about, and the fact that she was the only person in the world he would not be embarrassed to tell just what it was he had been thinking about at that moment convinced him, though a thousand things had already done so, that this was the woman he wanted to marry, had to marry, would marry.

Only the good deserve to hope.

Lampedusa had it right—things had to seem to change so that things could remain the same.

when scores of indicted criminals sit in parliament who could believe in the rule of law...

We never know them well. Do we?" "Who?" "Real people." "What do you mean, real people?" "As opposed to people in books," Paola explained. "They're the only ones we ever know well. Or know truly.

South. `But no name?, 'No, Guido. But I'll keep

I just go to lunch. And I never know when something is going into the file and something is not.

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

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

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.

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

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.