Quotes

All cruelty in life is about abuse of power.

It is important to me to live in the world I write about. If I want a character to do or know something, I want to do or know the same thing

When I was at college there were two things I vowed I'd never do. One was go to a funeral and the other was deal with computers. And then I ended up being a computer programmer in a morgue.

To almost die is to know that one day you will, and to never again feel the same about anything.

Enlightenment; do no harm; and leave the world a better place than you found it.

I write about crime, and my books are about the science of death - but also and much more so, about the art of life. When I sit down at my desk and write Scarpetta, I step through the looking glass and into her shoes. It's my job to endure if she's having a lousy day. I present her with a crime and make her life a misery by withholding information that I possess, but which she has to discover painstakingly, over the course of the book.

I find that people now have such short attention spans that I have to try really hard to keep the suspense going, so they don't have a reason to put down my book and read 20,000 Tweets instead. I constantly think about how people are reading and how they are managing their time, so I tailor my books to fit. Each chapter used to be twenty pages, but now it's ten pages. The books are still as long, just presented in shorter increments, like scenes in a movie.

I'm still a journalist at heart. I need to see, hear, smell and feel something so I can convey the sensations to my reader. If I want to read about a dangerous new firearm, I go see an expert who show me how to use it and shows me the damage it can do. I've never had any interest in scuba-diving, but because in 'Flesh and Blood' Scarpetta dives off a boat and has a scene 100 feet underwater, I had to do it too.

I don't believe any politician could or should take away the American people's right to bear arms, but I refuse to vote for any party that interferes in my personal choices, and tries to tell me who to be in love with or which God I should pray to.