Writer Quotes

Love is the flower of life, and blossoms unexpectedly and without law, and must be plucked where it is found, and enjoyed for the brief hour of its duration.

Do not allow to slip away from you freedoms the people who came before you won with such hard knocks.

The only justice is to follow the sincere intuition of the soul, angry or gentle. Anger is just, and pity is just, but judgement is never just.

I am in love - and, my God, it is the greatest thing that can happen to a man. I tell you, find a woman you can fall in love with. Do it. Let yourself fall in love. If you have not done so already, you are wasting your life.

In every living thing there is the desire for love.

Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you've got to say, and say it hot.

I want to live my life so that my nights are not full of regrets.

I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself. A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough without ever having felt sorry for itself.

The pace of Swedish crime fiction is slower - Stieg Larsson's the exception. And I think we use the environment more.

Swedish taxes are high, and we don't get as much as we used to for them. And our schools aren't so good.

Scandinavian crime fiction has become a great success all across the world and rightfully so. Sjowall and Wahloo ushered in a whole generation of Swedish crime writers, many of whom are now available in English.

People in Sweden talk a lot about the weather - how much we hate it. But Finns get more depressed.

One of the things I'm really good at is procrastinating.

Northern Sweden holds a special kind of magic. It's cold, lonely, and the people are tough and silent, or so the stereotype says. This is Asa Larsson's home turf and I find as much joy in reading her closely observed descriptions of the environment, as in following her intriguing plots.

In Sweden, we've moved away from the notion that mothers have some magical, special bond with children.

If I can hit No. 1 on the 'New York Times' best-seller list, I'm thinking of having the entire list tattooed on my body somewhere. It would be fabulous.

I've always viewed myself as a brand. When I started 10 years ago, that was very controversial. 'Marketing' and 'PR' were dirty words for the literary world, but that has changed. Once the book is finished, I want as many people as possible to read it.

I don't feel the need to prove myself by writing the next generational novel.

I do listen to Abba. And a lot of '80s and '90s pop music.

Crime stories are our version of sitting round a camp fire and telling tales. We enjoy being scared under safe circumstances. That's why there's no tradition of crime writing in countries that have wars.

Note to secessionist Texans: now is the time to wave the Confederate Flag.

Well, American dialects have been studied for a hundred years or so.

This African American Vernacular English shares most of its grammar and vocabulary with other dialects of English. But it is distinct in many ways, and it is more different from standard English than any other dialect spoken in continental North America.

It appears that the present-day form of African American English is not the inheritance of the period of slavery, but the creation of the second half of the 20th century.

I am now completing research supported by NSF and NEH that is mapping changes in the English language through all of North America, for both mainstream and minority communities.

However, research in the years that followed found that in many of its important features, African American Vernacular English was becoming not less, but more different from other dialects.

But unlike European countries, America has never finished a map of the United States, only the eastern United States is covered and a few spots here and there.

And instead of getting a pepper-and-salt effect, we find very clear and sharp divisions between the dialects of the United States, which are getting more different from each other as time goes on.

An important aspect of the current situation is the strong social reaction against suggestions that the home language of African American children be used in the first steps of learning to read and write.

We focus upon pairs of words very often which are the same in some areas and different in other areas.