Donna Leon
Donna Leon
Donna Leonis the American author of a series of crime novels set in Venice, Italy and featuring the fictional hero Commissario Guido Brunetti...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth29 September 1942
CountryUnited States of America
couple deaths five last maybe six
There has been a lot of suspicious, maybe hazing, deaths in the last couple of years-in the last five or six years.
people lazy trying
Italians know about human nature - they understand human nature perhaps better than anyone else does. They know that people are weak and greedy and lazy and dishonest and they just try to make the best of it; to work around it.
distance angel cities
And off in the far distance, the gold on the wings of the angel atop the bell tower of San Marco flashed in the sun, bathing the entire city in its glistening benediction.
without-hope
The ending is one of my blackest, utterly without hope of any sort.
violence fiction painful
So much of contemporary crime fiction is painful to read and obsessed with violence, particularly against women, and I can't read that.
novel plans outlines
I never know what's going to happen in a novel. I don't have a plan or an outline.
fate hands enemy
Oh, so seldom does fate cast our enemy into our hands, to do with as we will
wall stupid believe
We buy things. We wear them or put them on our walls, or sit on them, but anyone who wants to can take them away from us. Or break them. ... Long after he's dead, someone else will own those stupid little boxes, and then someone after him, just as someone owned them before he did. But no one ever thinks of that: objects survive us and go on living. It's stupid to believe we own them. And it's sinful for them to be so important.
lunch files knows
I just go to lunch. And I never know when something is going into the file and something is not.
people way bars
Sit around the bars, talked to people, ate in the restaurants, and chatted with the old ladies on the street. Fishermen are pretty much that way.
people favors asks
favors are always for ourselves. Especially when we ask for things for other people.
book writing two
I was extraordinarily lucky. I wrote a book because I wanted to see if I could write a mystery. Someone nagged me into sending it to a contest, which it won, after which I was offered a two-book contract, thus requiring the writing of a second book.
people want advantage
And I don't want to live anywhere where I am famous. It makes me very, very uncomfortable, because it conveys an advantage over people, and I don't like that.
almost best came friendship lucky remain time venice
I came to Venice for the first time in 1968 and was lucky enough to make the acquaintanceship, and then the friendship, of two Venetians, Roberta and Franco, who remain my best friends here after almost 50 years.