In TV writing, Armando Iannucci's satire 'The Thick of It' is brilliant - equal parts hysterically funny, terrifyingly believable, and Oh-my-God-I-can't-believe-he-actually-said-that - and it's got the most satisfyingly creative insults ever.

Tana French

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.

Tana French

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.

Tana French

With 'Broken Harbour,' a third of the way through, I worked it out and had to go back and bloody rewrite.

Tana French

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

Tana French

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.

Tana French

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.

Tana French

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.

Tana French

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

Tana French

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.

Tana French

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

Tana French

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.

Tana French

I'm a big admirer of Daniel Woodrell for his beautiful, precise, sparse prose - I don't do succinct well, so I'm in awe of writers who do.

Tana French

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.

Tana French

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.

Tana French

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.

Tana French

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.

Tana French

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.

Tana French

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

Tana French

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.

Tana French

Ireland is such a young society. The British were the ruling class up until they left about a hundred years ago, and we've been trying to work out what our class hierarchy is ever since.

Tana French