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I try to make my books reflect humanity as I see it.

My work is less violent because we tend to write what we want to read... and I'm not that interested in gruesome books. Any violence, to fit in well with a crime novel, has to have compassion.

I'm a novelist, that's how I make my livelihood, and I concentrate on the novels.

The things I keep going back to, rereading, maybe they say more about me as a reader than about the books. Love in the Time of Cholera, Pale Fire.

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.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Every time I write a new novel about something sombre and sobering and terrible I think, 'oh Lord, they're not going to want to go here'. But they do. Readers of fiction read, I think, for a deeper embrace of the world, of reality. And that's brave.

So much of contemporary crime fiction is painful to read and obsessed with violence, particularly against women, and I can't read that.

The ultimate tendency of civilization is towards barbarism.