356 Quotes by Tana French

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

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.

Your character is always right. No real person thinks they're being stupid or misguided or bigoted or evil or just plain wrong - so your characters can't, either.

Don't be scared of 'said.' Writers sometimes go looking for alternatives because they worry that 'he said' and 'she said' will feel repetitive if they're used all the time, but I swear, they won't.

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.

I reread a lot. I must have read 'The Once and Future King,' 'Watership Down' and Mary Renault's 'Theseus' books at least a dozen times each.

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.

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 had a pretty happy, loved childhood.