Top 37 Quotes & Sayings by Kerry Greenwood

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an Australian author Kerry Greenwood.
Last updated on December 3, 2024.
Kerry Greenwood

Kerry Isabelle Greenwood is an Australian author and lawyer. She has written many plays and books, most notably a string of historical detective novels centred on the character of Phryne Fisher, which was adapted as the popular television series Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries. She writes mysteries, science-fiction, historical fiction, children's stories, and plays. Greenwood earned the Australian women's crime fiction Davitt Award in 2002 for her young adult novel The Three-Pronged Dagger.

I think it is rather heroic to go into a war zone where everyone is trying to kill you, and you have no way of shooting back.
I like writing books. I really love words. I love to read.
I don't think the process of writing books is in any way sensible. It's not logical, and it's not reasonable. I do write very fast, and I just do it in a binge. Other people binge-drink; I binge-write.
A publisher saw one of my historical novels and thought I would write an admirable detective story, so she offered me a two-book contract, and I grabbed it.
When I first started writing the books in the 1980s, all of the female detectives were flawed in some way because they were based on noir characters.
As a child, I would demand that visitors to our house tell me a story. I was intensely interested in everything - still am.
I research every possible bit of information I can find. Then I use about a tenth of it. But I have to know all the information first; otherwise, I'm not going to convince myself, and if I can't convince myself, then I'm not going to convince the reader.
I went to a basic school, which had children from all corners of the world, and met my best friend and had to learn Greek because she didn't speak English. — © Kerry Greenwood
I went to a basic school, which had children from all corners of the world, and met my best friend and had to learn Greek because she didn't speak English.
The stories from World War I are worse than anything I have ever read.
You need a crime, a detective, and the solution.
I don't steal stories. If I'm a plagiarist, so is Hitchcock. And Tolkien. And Shakespeare.
I got out of difficult situations when many of my classmates didn't because I was smart, and I was lucky, and my parents were amazingly literate and helpful.
I liked the Ballarat train as a child.
In the 1970s, I used to buy opals and moonstones at the Queen Victoria Market, which were seen as old-fashioned and too heavy at the time.
There are only so many stories in the world... Duplication of plots is bound to happen because most writers have read very extensively in their genre and have become aware they are adding an extra layer to the meta-narrative, finding a new spin on the original.
Most detective story readers are an educated audience and know there are only a certain number of plots. The interest lies in what the writer does with them.
Sometimes it's hard to start, but once it gets going, once you reach the tipping point - usually between chapter seven and nine - then it's like hanging onto a large snowball as it hurtles downhill.
I have been reading crime books ever since I was a child, but I had never tried to write one. — © Kerry Greenwood
I have been reading crime books ever since I was a child, but I had never tried to write one.
I remember talking to John Mortimer, and he said he was relying on Rumpole to keep him in his old age; well, I'm doing the same with Phryne - she's my mainstay.
I have to write three books a year to make a reasonable living out of writing - unless, of course, she gets a major American film deal. Phryne has been optioned since the very first book, but to make a historical TV movie, it costs $30,000 a day extra for the historical detail to be correct, so most people aren't doing it.
I've always been in love with Melbourne. When I was 12, I was taken into the city by my grandmother to go to the ballet for the first time.
I fell in love with words in all languages, and I read everything I could find, particularly myths and legends and histories and archeology and any novels. — © Kerry Greenwood
I fell in love with words in all languages, and I read everything I could find, particularly myths and legends and histories and archeology and any novels.
I'm a duty solicitor, so I can't fix someone's life; all I can do is fix the problem I've got in front of my eyes.
I didn't want to write a grown-up account of Gallipoli. I wanted to find out what would happen if I looked at Gallipoli through the eyes of an innocent.
There's something magical about the idea that you can write something down and someone else can read it. I'm still mildly agog about that.
I was determined to become a criminal lawyer and help look after the poor.
Clothes were terribly important in the '20s. They really were an arbiter of who you were and how much money you had: an indicator of social status.
My work is very carefully researched. Sometimes I have to ditch an idea because I can't prove it.
I used to tell my three younger siblings stories because that was my household chore, and I told long stories in installments because it was easier and more fun than making up a new story every night. I loved it.
I decided that if I want to write about a female hero in the 1920s, I'm going to have to give her all the advantages I can because she has serious disadvantages in being a woman. I wasn't going to have her cowed or overawed by class, so she had to be titled.
If you look at the map, there's Thrace, Greece, Bulgaria, and there's tiny Gallipoli. It is such a small part of the whole peninsula, and yet you only hear about this little tiny bit.
Unanswered questions make my head itch. — © Kerry Greenwood
Unanswered questions make my head itch.
I'm concealing a lot of things. That's what a lady does.
There are good sailors. Well, some good sailors. In a way they are ideal as husbands. They drop in every six months for a wild celebration, then they drop out again before one gets bored with their company or annoyed with by their habits.
And they need not cause you grief. As my Highland grandmother said-and she had the Sight-Tis not the dead ye have to be concerned about! Beware of the Living! And she was a wise woman. The dead are beyond your help or mine, poor things. But the living need us. Thirty souls at the least, Phryne, are still on that island to praise God who might now be angels-or devils.
If I ever saw my muse she would be an old woman with a tight bun and spectacles poking me in the middle of the back and growling, "Wake up and write the book!
I have a theory that kitchens, once they reach a certain level of complexity, attract new gadgets into their orbit, like planets. Only this can account for the fact that I own two melon ballers.
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