Donna Leon quotes:

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.

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

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

The Germans and Austrians are very polite, the Swiss are very reserved and the Spanish usually kiss me. The Brits write me letters.

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 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.

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'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.

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.

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.

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

I don't go to the movies because I don't like films.

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

I have always had a particular antagonism for the military.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

favors are always for ourselves. Especially when we ask for things for other people.

This is a fallen world. People lie, the truth gets distorted, and that's the way it is. What's for dinner ?

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

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 love music. But I've never owned a TV in my adult life, and I've never lived in a place with a television.

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.

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

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.

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

Sit around the bars, talked to people, ate in the restaurants, and chatted with the old ladies on the street. Fishermen are pretty much that way.

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