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Much violence is based on the illusion that life is a property to be defended and not to be shared.

I'm very bad at violence in real life. I can't stand it. And I'm so fed up with crime novels that have too much violence. I can't really do it. It's unnecessary.

Violence can be very grotesque and also intensely attractive. What interests me is how the two - beauty and violence - live side by side, and how moments can be created and erased almost simultaneously. Destruction is painful, but at times it can be very cathartic.

I get very tired of violence in crime fiction. Maybe it is what life is like, but I don't want to do it in my books.

It seems disingenuous to ask a writer why she, or he, is writing about a violent subject when the world and history are filled with violence.

One thing, however, I know with certainty: violence, or the direct threat of violence, of the kind we have seen in the past few days, is totally unjustified as a response to any published word or image.

Violence is a part of the world and life, and you shouldn't have to take it out of stories.

I never set out to write literature; I set out to tell stories. And some of my work may be very raunchy and very bloodthirsty - but life, for me, is a violent thing.

Violence isn't always evil. What's evil is the infatuation with violence.

I think there's as much violence, in a way, as a scene with two women having a cup of coffee in a Ruth Rendell novel - in terms of emotional violence and the violence you can inflict with language - as there is in the most graphic kind of serial killer/slasher novel you can think of.