“I told the caterer I’d work for nothing if he’d teach me about catering. I lasted one week full-time. It was exhausting.”
“I like cream cheese in just about anything.”
“The main thing I look for in a recipe is taste, which is different from caterers and restaurants, who first ask ‘How does it look?’”
“When I make a recipe for the first time and it’s fabulous, I know I’m in trouble because I don’t know exactly what I did, and I can’t replicate it.”
“I wanted to be a literary writer, so I wrote story after story and sent them to ‘The New Yorker.’”
“After I outlined ‘Catering to Nobody,’ I went and worked for a caterer. And the other thing I had to do was to talk to the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Department about how they investigated a crime.”
“The thing is, if you make best-sellerdom your goal, you’re going to be in trouble. It’s a very nice thing to have happen, but if one makes that a goal like, say, a literary writer has the goal of getting the Pulitzer Prize, that’s so unpredictable.”
“What one’s goal should be is just to become a better writer and to tell different kinds of stories.”
“I’m always astonished to see how badly people can behave when they think no one is noticing.”
“In a mystery, the sleuth must be believably involved and emotionally invested in solving the crime.”
“Catering is extremely demanding financially and physically. It’s a business.”
“One thing that improved my cooking skills was being a poor student in California… If you don’t have much money, you have to learn to cook.”
“Writing is work and cooking is relaxing.”
“I write in the morning – and then I’m always experimenting and tasting recipes for the books.”
“When I started to write culinary mysteries, I did it because nobody was doing it anymore.”
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