I’m always astonished to see how badly people can behave when they think no one is noticing.

Writing is work and cooking is relaxing.

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.

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...

I write in the morning – and then I’m always experimenting and tasting recipes for the books.

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.

What one’s goal should be is just to become a better writer and to tell different kinds of stories.

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.

When I started to write culinary mysteries, I did it because nobody was doing it anymore.

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...

I like cream cheese in just about anything.

I wanted to be a literary writer, so I wrote story after story and sent them to ‘The New Yorker.’

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.

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?’