Donna Leon Quotes

28 quotes in 462 categories

• My father read 'The New York Times,' my mother did secretarial work, we had a dog, we had a garden, I had a brother.
• And off in the far distance, the gold on the wings of the angel atop the bell tower of San Marco flashed in the sun,…
• Oh, so seldom does fate cast our enemy into our hands, to do with as we will
• The Germans and Austrians are very polite, the Swiss are very reserved and the Spanish usually kiss me. The Brits write me letters.
• 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…
• I just go to lunch. And I never know when something is going into the file and something is not.
• Ruth Bader Ginsburg is the most liberal and illumined of the nine Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court.
• I do not take any pleasure whatsoever in being a famous person.
• I don't go to the movies because I don't like films.
• I have always had a particular antagonism for the military.
• I know you shouldn't spit in your own soup but I think most crime writing is like TV and doesn't make enormous demands on one's…
• 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.
• I never know what's going to happen in a novel. I don't have a plan or an outline.
• I never wanted to be rich or successful or famous. I just wanted to be happy and have fun.
• So much of contemporary crime fiction is painful to read and obsessed with violence, particularly against women, and I can't read that.
• The ending is one of my blackest, utterly without hope of any sort.
• Venetians feel affection and loyalty to their city, rather than to the Italian state.
• 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 find the idea of vigilante justice very attractive. I like the idea that the murderer decides that this person has gone too far, and…
• Sit around the bars, talked to people, ate in the restaurants, and chatted with the old ladies on the street. Fishermen are pretty much that…

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