Peter Temple

There's a high point in your career, and then people get bored; they want something else to come along.

I think Melbourne is by far and away the most interesting place in Australia, and I thought if I ever wrote a novel or crime novel of any kind, I had to set it here.

For some men, life seems to be one long attempt to escape childhood and all the fears of childhood. That's what many of us are doing.

The real difference between literature and pulp is the kind of emotional responses they elicit. Dan Brown can't pierce your heart. Patricia Cornwell can't make you read a sentence twice and then look sightlessly out of the window.

I think if you live in a country, basically you share the dominant values of a country although you may disagree on issues all the time.

A lot of crime fiction writing is also lazy. Personality is supposed to be shown by the protagonist's taste in music, or we're told that the hero looks like the young Cary Grant. Film is the medium these writers are looking for.

In writing, I'm totally anti-plans of any kind. All my attempts to plan and plot novels have come to grief, and in expensive ways.