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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The character I created, ‘Commissario Brunetti,’ who appears in all my books, shares similar reading, artistic and musical tastes with me. Subconsciously, I knew that if I was to spend however long it would take to write this book with him, this man would have to be someone I’d like to have dinner with.
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.