Chelsea Cain quotes:

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  • I was a library rat and a bookworm. I read all the time. I walked to school reading books. I read under my desk.

  • I used to write travel essays, and I was struck by how the fact of writing about a place would change my relationship with it. I would make completely different choices, do things I wouldn't have normally, because I had to fill this narrative shape.

  • I was obsessed with Val McDermid's Tony Hill and Carol Jordan books, delightfully twisted stuff.

  • There's something about the Pacific Northwest, the scale of it, and the fact that not so long ago people came here and died getting here, and then died the first winter they were here. There's this breathtaking beauty, just a little bit of moss on the tree, just this little thread of danger, and the sinister. And I really like that.

  • I love the fact that we are surrounded by this spectacular natural beauty that routinely strikes us dead. Hikers walk off into the woods and are never seen again. And still we tug on our fleece and skip off into the wilderness, not a care in the world.

  • Ugly people kill people all the time. But when pretty people did, it got attention.

  • I grew up in Washington State and then eventually found my way back to Iowa City for grad school.

  • You know what I hate? I hate people who give me plants. The whole giving someone plants - it's like giving someone a pet. I'm giving you responsibility, I'm giving you a thing that you now have to take care of for, like, a year until it dies, and then I'm giving you sadness and guilt.

  • I have traveled a fair amount, and I have visited some great cities. I love architecture and museums and castles and ruins and central markets and even double-decker bus tours. But, I am a sucker for a tropical beach.

  • Somehow, having an office that I had to go to made me want to work from home, which is easier to do if you don't have a boss waiting for you at the office, even a very blue office.

  • People come to Portland, many of them for the quality of life. They love the physical space here. And yet every year, people climbing the mountain get killed by avalanches.

  • I finished 'Heartsick' with my daughter asleep in her bassinet by my desk, a feat that any new mother will tell you cannot be sufficiently praised.

  • I've always been more interested in what happens after the bad thing has happened - the fallout of the bad thing, when people are already damaged. I'm less interested in seeing people when they're fine and following their journey to becoming damaged.

  • Every year, I give my dad an advance copy of my latest book. He reads it over the next several nights and says something incredibly supportive. Then he clears his throat nervously and changes the subject.

  • I guess people might be surprised to know I read comic books. I'm a Marvel girl, as opposed to DC.

  • You won't make a living writing until you learn to write when you don't want to.

  • I was born in Iowa City and spent my early childhood on a hippie commune just outside of town.

  • You should have me restrained,' she said. 'I could kill you. You never know when I might have a razor blade tucked up my sleeve.''Why kill me now?' Archie said. 'It would seem anticlimactic."

  • Worst part of being a writer: having to tell my toddler that I can't play with her because I'm working. Keep in mind that working consists of me at home with a laptop on my lap sitting on the couch. It doesn't look like working. I don't have a hammer or anything.

  • They were going to have a conversation, he realized. Archie didn't know a lot about women, but he had been married and he knew when a conversation was coming, and he knew when a woman wanted to have one, the best thing you could do was get it over with.

  • I've written books for awhile, but always on a pretty small scale and always pretty self-indulgent. I chose projects that I thought would be really fun to work on and found friends to work on them with me, and it was all about the process.

  • When I say that I went to grad school in Iowa City, people often assume that I went to the famed writers' workshop MFA program at the University of Iowa. I didn't. I got a master's in journalism.

  • Memory is a fiction we tell ourselves: just a piece of the truth.

  • I like signing books for a living; I do. But you have no idea the panic that sets in. I am not a very good speller. Put me in a stresser situation, and I lose all capacity to recall how to spell the most simple names.

  • I think of it as the lasagna approach to writing because I'm always adding layers. I'll sometimes do it layer by layer, with dialogue, attribution, action, objects in the scene, setting... It can be sometimes that delineated.

  • I'm a sucker for a screwed-up protagonist. We all have issues.

  • Writing tips are like mini skirts. Sometimes they fit perfectly, sometimes they make you cry, and sometimes you can reuse the material and sew yourself a pillow or something.

  • I am a control freak, but not when I travel. For some reason when I travel, I am able to surrender more than in my real life. I am able to let go. I think it's why I like it so much.

  • But people in masks were always assholes. It was a scientific law. Give someone anonymity and all social niceties break down. The Internet had proven that."

  • Don't let your characters tell you what to do. They can be pushy. Some writers say that they create characters and then just sort of follow them around through the narrative. I think that these writers are out of their minds.

  • I was pregnant with my daughter when I started writing my first thriller, so I guess you could blame hormones.

  • Something about the way she moves through the world does not lend itself to the care of fragile objects.

  • You find that you have lot of time on your hands when you suddenly are not drinking because you are pregnant.

  • Our relationship is complicated by the fact that I am emotionally retarded.

  • There will be time to diet when people stopped killing one another.

  • Great. First the anonymous call. Now letters. Body parts all over town. It was like a scavenger hunt for psychos. Running after clues with a half-deranged, serial-killer-obsessed, recovering-addict cop was not a good idea. Then again...

  • Whatever you think this is going to be like," she whispers, "it's going to be worse.

  • Lovely chatting with you, darling, but I've got to run. Face it, you're always more content when you're chasing me than when you have me locked up. I think we're going to have a lot of fun.

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