Kerry Greenwood
As a child, I would demand that visitors to our house tell me a story. I was intensely interested in everything - still am.
A publisher saw one of my historical novels and thought I would write an admirable detective story, so she offered me a two-book contract, and I grabbed it.
I fell in love with words in all languages, and I read everything I could find, particularly myths and legends and histories and archeology and any novels.
Unanswered questions make my head itch.
If you look at the map, there's Thrace, Greece, Bulgaria, and there's tiny Gallipoli. It is such a small part of the whole peninsula, and yet you only hear about this little tiny bit.
I'm a duty solicitor, so I can't fix someone's life; all I can do is fix the problem I've got in front of my eyes.
I have to write three books a year to make a reasonable living out of writing - unless, of course, she gets a major American film deal. Phryne has been optioned since the very first book, but to make a historical TV movie, it costs $30,000 a day extra for the historical detail to be correct, so most people aren't doing it.
I've always been in love with Melbourne. When I was 12, I was taken into the city by my grandmother to go to the ballet for the first time.
I decided that if I want to write about a female hero in the 1920s, I'm going to have to give her all the advantages I can because she has serious disadvantages in being a woman. I wasn't going to have her cowed or overawed by class, so she had to be titled.
I used to tell my three younger siblings stories because that was my household chore, and I told long stories in installments because it was easier and more fun than making up a new story every night. I loved it.
I went to a basic school, which had children from all corners of the world, and met my best friend and had to learn Greek because she didn't speak English.
Clothes were terribly important in the '20s. They really were an arbiter of who you were and how much money you had: an indicator of social status.
My work is very carefully researched. Sometimes I have to ditch an idea because I can't prove it.
I didn't want to write a grown-up account of Gallipoli. I wanted to find out what would happen if I looked at Gallipoli through the eyes of an innocent.
The stories from World War I are worse than anything I have ever read.
I think it is rather heroic to go into a war zone where everyone is trying to kill you, and you have no way of shooting back.
I got out of difficult situations when many of my classmates didn't because I was smart, and I was lucky, and my parents were amazingly literate and helpful.
I was determined to become a criminal lawyer and help look after the poor.
In the 1970s, I used to buy opals and moonstones at the Queen Victoria Market, which were seen as old-fashioned and too heavy at the time.
Sometimes it's hard to start, but once it gets going, once you reach the tipping point - usually between chapter seven and nine - then it's like hanging onto a large snowball as it hurtles downhill.
I remember talking to John Mortimer, and he said he was relying on Rumpole to keep him in his old age; well, I'm doing the same with Phryne - she's my mainstay.
I have been reading crime books ever since I was a child, but I had never tried to write one.
When I first started writing the books in the 1980s, all of the female detectives were flawed in some way because they were based on noir characters.
You need a crime, a detective, and the solution.
I like writing books. I really love words. I love to read.
There's something magical about the idea that you can write something down and someone else can read it. I'm still mildly agog about that.
I don't think the process of writing books is in any way sensible. It's not logical, and it's not reasonable. I do write very fast, and I just do it in a binge. Other people binge-drink; I binge-write.
I research every possible bit of information I can find. Then I use about a tenth of it. But I have to know all the information first; otherwise, I'm not going to convince myself, and if I can't convince myself, then I'm not going to convince the reader.
There are only so many stories in the world... Duplication of plots is bound to happen because most writers have read very extensively in their genre and have become aware they are adding an extra layer to the meta-narrative, finding a new spin on the original.
Most detective story readers are an educated audience and know there are only a certain number of plots. The interest lies in what the writer does with them.
I don't steal stories. If I'm a plagiarist, so is Hitchcock. And Tolkien. And Shakespeare.
I liked the Ballarat train as a child.
If I ever saw my muse she would be an old woman with a tight bun and spectacles poking me in the middle of the back and growling, "Wake up and write the book!Collection: Book
I have a theory that kitchens, once they reach a certain level of complexity, attract new gadgets into their orbit, like planets. Only this can account for the fact that I own two melon ballers.Collection: Two
There are good sailors. Well, some good sailors. In a way they are ideal as husbands. They drop in every six months for a wild celebration, then they drop out again before one gets bored with their company or annoyed with by their habits.Collection: Husband
I'm concealing a lot of things. That's what a lady does.Collection: Doe
And they need not cause you grief. As my Highland grandmother said-and she had the Sight-Tis not the dead ye have to be concerned about! Beware of the Living! And she was a wise woman. The dead are beyond your help or mine, poor things. But the living need us. Thirty souls at the least, Phryne, are still on that island to praise God who might now be angels-or devils.Collection: Wise