I’m slightly in awe of writers, such as Sophie Hannah, who follow outlines.

I read one book where the characters never said anything; instead, they spent all their time grunting and bleating and hissing and cooing and growling and chirping and… It was like a menagerie in there. After a while, I wasn’t even taking in the rest of the book, because that was all I could see: the dialogue tags.

Most animals are pragmatic about mysteries: If they run across something they don’t understand, all they care about is whether it’s edible and whether it’s dangerous. Humans, on the other hand, are drawn to the mystery for its own sake.

When I was acting, I got trained in creating a character as a three-dimensional person. If you‘re doing it right you should be able to draw an audience into the character’s world and make them feel their fears.

I’m always looking for the potential mystery in everything; I can’t imagine writing about anything else.

Both back when I was acting and now that I’m writing, I’ve always wanted the same thing out of my career: to be able to get up in the morning and do what I love doing.

I’ve got this theory that human beings are innately religious; we have a belief system. It doesn’t have to be a theist form, necessarily. But we need a belief system, some framework on which to hang our behavior.

I’ve been fascinated by mysteries for as long as I can remember. Real, fictional, solved, unsolved, I don’t care; they all fascinate me. I think that’s a core human trait.

For a moment, I felt as if the universe had turned upside down and we were falling softly into an enormous black bowl of stars, and I knew, beyond any doubt, that everything was going to be alright.

I’d always been fascinated by archaeology; it was my original career plan as a kid.

For me, a relationship with a place is very fundamental. When you’re moving – when you’re leaving your life and the place where you’ve lived on a semi-regular basis – you tend to connect the sense of your entire life to that place that you’ve left.

Don’t you ever feel that – that you just need to get away? From everything? That it’s all too much?

I love writing. I feel ridiculously lucky that this is what I get to do all day.

Don’t get discouraged if you’re hammering away at a sentence or a paragraph or a chapter, and it keeps coming out wrong. You’re allowed to get it wrong, as many times as you need to; you only need to get it right once.

Donna Tartt blows me away – that impeccable writing, so rich you could eat it and so luminous that it lights up the whole room, and the way she brings her characters to life so completely and in such fine detail that you know them as intimately as your dearest friends.

I thought I could never write a proper book; I’d never done it before. But I thought I could write a sequence. Then I had a chapter. The next thing I knew I was turning acting down.

In terms of pure volume, I probably read more psychological mystery and historical true crime than anything else.

We moved around a lot when I was kid. I’d lived in three continents before I was 12.

I remember reading about the Marie Celeste when I was a kid and becoming obsessed with what happened.

I wanted to tell her that being loved is a talent too, that it takes as much guts and as much work as loving; that some people, for whatever reason, never learn the knack

The thing about being a mystery writer, what marks a mystery writer out from a chick lit author or historical fiction writer, is that you always find a mystery in every situation.

Everybody has ways in which they’ve been lucky in life, and everybody also has ways in which they’ve definitely rolled snake eyes.

I’m still very much in the apprentice stage of writing. I read somewhere that you need to write a million words before you know what you’re doing – so I’m headed that way, but I’m nowhere near there.

I weaned myself on the nostalgia equivalent of methadone (less addictive, less obvious, less likely to make you crazy): missing what I had never had.

When you’re too close to people, when you spend too much time with them and love them too dearly, sometimes you can’t see them

I had a pretty happy, loved childhood.

I like writing about big turning points, where professional and personal lives coalesce, where the boundaries are coming down, and you’re faced with a set of choices which will change life forever.

If you’re writing a scene for a character with whom you disagree in every way, you still need to show how that character is absolutely justified in his or her own mind, or the scene will come across as being about the author’s views rather than about the character’s.

I like books like ‘The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher,’ where the investigation of a crime becomes a way into an exploration of the society where the crime took place.

I found out early that you can throw yourself away, missing what you’ve lost.

My night stand is permanently jammed with books I want to read.

Sometimes, when you’re close to someone, you miss things. Other people can see them, but you can’t.

You don’t have to like your family, you don’t even have to spend time with them, to know them right down to the bone.

Privately, I consider religion to be a load of bollocks, but when you have a sobbing five year old wanting to know what happened to her hamster, you develop an instant belief in anything that dissolves some of the heartbreak off her face.

It’s OK to screw up. For me, this was the big revelation when I was writing my first book, ‘In the Woods‘: I could get it wrong as many times as I needed to.

If you’re too lucky, it can be very easy to lack the ability to believe that other people’s lived experience is real when it doesn’t match up with yours.

If you rewrite a paragraph fifty times and forty-nine of them are terrible, that’s fine; you only need to get it right once.

I don’t do that kind of negativity. If you put your energy into thinking about how much the fall would hurt, you’re already halfway down.

I came from a house full of books, so I took reading for granted. I was an outdoorsy little kid, too, so I got the best of both worlds by taking books up trees and reading there.

With acting, you have to depend on somebody else to decide if you are allowed to work. You can spend weeks and months when you are not acting at all.