Libraries are the backbone of our education system.

As awful as crime can be, it's what happens afterward - the struggling to get out of bed, to put one foot in front of the other - that alters people.

I think chalking up human behavior to evil lets us all off the hook too easily.

My job isn't to preach to people, it's to entertain them. I like letting the characters speak for themselves.

I love puns. I've been known to turn the car around just to take advantage of a good pun situation. It really is the highest form of humor.

I certainly went to high school with some mean girls, and I would not wish that hell on anybody.

I read about violent things. I think what I get out of that is entertainment by learning about different things, and reading the genre and getting an understanding of motivations. But at the end of the day, it's still a book, and I can walk away.

I think a lot of people are curious about what makes people do what they do, and I guess my curiosity isn't hidden in any way.

Usually, when inspiration strikes late, the light of day reveals that I haven't gotten an idea for a book so much as a psychiatric case study.

When I was growing up, my stepmother's sister was the chief detective in one of the adjoining towns, so she piqued my interest in crime.

Visual storytelling is at once immediate and subversive.

Flannery O'Connor was a revelation for me. When I read her, I was very young, and I didn't understand what she was doing. I didn't see any of the Catholicism or any of the social stuff.

I thought I had to write literature and add my name to the list of great Southern storytellers. Fortunately for me, no one wanted to read any of those stories. They got rejected by everyone. Sometimes, I would get a note saying they liked the writing, but the story simply didn't work.

Good crime writing holds up a mirror to the readers and reflects in a darker light the world in which they live.

When I became a published writer, I said, 'Whatever I can do to help the libraries I want to do,' so all of my book tours since then have involved me coming to a library and talking about how important libraries are for a community.

As a writer, I've always felt it's my job to be extremely careful when writing about victims, especially women.

I never really fitted in, because I've always been interested in really dark things.

No crime lab in the world looks like the 'CSI' ones because there's simply not the money for all those fancy machines.

I read a lot of true crime growing up - 'The Stranger Beside Me' by Ann Rule about Ted Bundy.

Reading is power. Reading is life.

It sounds pretentious to say I 'divide' my time, but when I am home, that usually means my house in Atlanta or my cabin in the North Georgia Mountains. The latter is where I do the majority of my writing.

Growing up in Georgia in the southeastern United States, I was always reading and always kept to myself. I never felt isolated, though; I just liked being alone.

As much as we would like to deny it, reading is not vital to human survival.

With 'Pretty Girls,' I saw the opportunity to talk not just about crime but what crime leaves behind.