Michael Robotham quotes:

Journalism took me around the world. I worked in London for ten years and reported on the collapse of the Soviet Union, the troubles in Northern Ireland, and the first Gulf War.

I normally sleep very well, but when I do have bad dreams, they always involve my children.

You're not supposed to have a favourite book - it's like children.

All of my novels are seeded in real life events, and 'The Wreckage' is no different.

Violence is inevitable in crime novels, but there are many different ways to tell a story. I use my characters' reactions to illustrate the worst moments rather than let readers witness them at first hand.

Everybody you work with has their own voice, and if you do your job well enough, even their closest friends or their partner of 40 years isn't going to recognise the fingerprints of a ghostwriter.

I often joke that I could write 'War and Peace' and make it sound like Geri Halliwell wrote it.

I'd like to set a story in Australia, but I would need to feel confident my German and U.S. readers, for example, would stay with me.

People who lose children have their hearts warped into weird shapes. Some try to deny it has happened. Some pretend it hasn't. Losing friends or parents is not the same. To lose a child is beyond comprehension. It defies biology. It contradicts the natural order of history and genealogy. It derails common sense. It violates time. It creates a huge, black, bottomless hole that swallows all hope.

Love and pain are not the same. But sometimes it feels like they should be. Love is put to test everyday. Pain is not. Yet the two of them are inseparable because true love cannot bear separation.

I write entertainment. There are some books you read but don't inhale. There are books that will change your life.

One of the strange things about friendship is that time together isn't cancelled out by time apart. One doesn't erase the other or balance it on some invisible scale. You can spend a few hours with someone and they will change your life, or you can spend a lifetime with a person and remain unchanged.

Alcoholics don't have relationships-they take hostages.

Why do our parents have the ability to make us feel like children even when our hair is graying and we have a mortgage that feels like a Third World debt? (135)

You try to understand human behavior. You try to explain it. Not me. I know we're smaller than gorillas, bigger than chimps, worse than both of them and, for all our rationality, our rules and laws, our baser drives are still straight out of the jungle."

A perfect hero is about as boring as a perfect marriage.

In the mid-nineties, I quit my job as a senior feature writer at 'The Mail' on Sunday in the U.K. and became a 'ghost writer,' collaborating with politicians, pop stars, psychologists, soldiers and sporting legends who needed help in penning their autobiographies.

People think it's easy to be cynical and pessimistic, but it's incredibly hard work. It's much easier to be hopeful."

Remember, the worst hour of your life only lasts for sixty minutes. (292)

If I become the man you want, I wouldn't be the man I am.

Jealousy is a terrible thing. I know all the psychological triggers. The fear of losing control, the fear of loss, the fear of abandonment, neglect and loneliness...But the most destructive thing about jealousy is that it kills what it values-the love you want to save won't survive the constraints of jealousy. There is no entitlement. Love is either equal or a tragedy.

People think it's easy to be cynical and pessimistic, but it's incredibly hard work. It's much easier to be hopeful.

Sometimes friends do foolish things. My father told me that true friends are like gold coins. Ships are wrecked by storms and lie for hundreds of years on the ocean floor. Worms destroy the wood. Iron corrodes. Silver turns black but gold doesn't change in sea water. It loses none of its brilliance or colour. It comes up the same. It survives shipwrecks and time.

That's the problem with folks nowadays. Nobody takes responsibility for their actions. Make a mistake and you pay for it. That's life.

I don't know what else to tell you. I often think how different my life would have been - how much happier - if you'd been a part of it. One day.