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Your image isn't your character. Character is what you are as a person.

A lot of writers, especially crime writers, have an image that we think we're trying to keep up with. You've got to be seen as dark and slightly dangerous. But I'm not like that and I've realised that I don't need to put that on. People will buy the books whether they see a photo of you dressed in black or not.

Once you start writing a character visually, you're in trouble.

I don't tend to picture my characters as actors and actresses.

I think you have to draw from any character and bring it to yourself as much as possible.

Once you have your characters, they tell you what to write, you don't tell them.

There is no need to change my image. I like my image, and the audience likes it, too. I am very comfortable with the kind of roles I do, and as I am not doing the same character or playing myself. I explore my characters; I don't brood over my broody image.

Sometimes you have to delete characters from a scene just to keep from overcrowding the image.

You have to avoid caricature, at the one end of the spectrum, and sentimentality, at the other; which is not to say that such characters shouldn't be funny part of the time, or that their actions shouldn't evoke genuine feeling.