Quotes from Donna Leon

I have no memory for what happens in what books. I don't know when I might remember a scene, but beats me what book it's in because there are 14 of them now.

So much of contemporary crime fiction is painful to read and obsessed with violence, particularly against women, and I can't read that.

A story begins and it always passes from the subjunctive to the declarative. And Italians don't seem to care about making a fine distinction between that which is speculation and that which is fact.

I'm involved with a baroque opera company here in Italy. I write some of their booklet material, comments on operas. I also write for some baroque opera festivals because this music is my real passion.

The ending is one of my blackest, utterly without hope of any sort.

My father read 'The New York Times,' my mother did secretarial work, we had a dog, we had a garden, I had a brother.

I never know what's going to happen in a novel. I don't have a plan or an outline.

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.

I find the idea of vigilante justice very attractive. I like the idea that the murderer decides that this person has gone too far, and nothing will happen to him unless she does something to stop him.

They hadn't lived long enough to understand what grace it was to die in an instant and not to linger.

Don't you have any desire for vengeance? he asked before he remembered that she wasn't Italian.

As if sensing his attention, Paola turned her head towards him and allowed her eyes to close and then open slowly, as though she'd been told that the Crucifixion had only just begun and there still remained a number of nails. The

Why bother to put the boy who broke into a house in jail when the man who stole billions from the health system is named ambassador to the country to which he had been sending the money for years?

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

Even if exile is spent in the most beautiful city in the world, Brunetti realized, it is still exile.

Patta's expression seemed cordial enough, though from past experience Brunetti knew this was meaningless: vipers liked to bask on rocks in the sunshine, did they not?

He dealt every day with people who believed they weren't happy and who further believed that by committing some crime—theft, murder, deceit, blackmail, even kidnapping—they would find the magic elixir that would transform the perceived misery of their lives into that most desired of states: happiness

Beauty was where you found it, and it was always comforting to see.

She became his Ariadne, leading him through the labyrinth of books, stopping now and then to pass another one to him.

We work in a profession that has consequences for the heart

We are a nation of egoists. It is our glory, but it will be our destruction, for none of us can be made to concern ourselves about something as abstract as "the common good". The best of us can rise to feeling concern for our families, but as a nation we are incapable of more.

Brunetti had long been of the opinion that one of the handicaps of stupidity was its inability to imagine intelligence.

I think people prefer to remember happy times, well, happier times, and if they can't remember them, then to change the memories and make them happier.

Life had taught him to be profoundly suspicious of coincidence, and it had similarly taught him to view any seemingly random conjunction of events or persons as coincidence and thus be suspicious of that, as well.