Lisa Lutz Quotes

I learned how to cross-country ski.

I have certain rules for snooping, under which anything out in the open is fair game.

Years ago, when my attempts at a writing career came to a complete stand-still, I applied to the Los Angeles Police Department. This might seem odd for a liberal woman who once went to UC Santa Cruz, but I’ve always had a powerful fascination with crime and serious interest in finding different ways to contend with it.

I was young, maybe 4, when I learned where babies came from.

Maggie is my sister-in-law, married to my brother David. She is a defense attorney who devotes 25 percent of her practice to pro bono wrongful-incarceration cases.

Sometimes a single item can wrap up, in a nutshell, who a person is. In my grandparents’ home, a clear plastic container was enthroned on top of the mahogany bar for at least a decade. Painted on the lid in pink, yellow and light blue was ‘Have a Nosh With Mort & Ethel’.

We’re all amateur investigators. We scan bookshelves, we ogle trinkets left out in the open, we calculate the cost of furniture and study the photographs on display; sometimes we even check out the medicine cabinet.

I’m always accused of being a crime novelist, but I’m not really.

I could never really choose a favorite book, but whenever I’m asked what my favorite movie is, I always say ‘Withnail & I,’ a British film from 1987. It’s funny and sad and absolutely gorgeous to look at. It’s the film I can watch over and over again.

I didn’t feel a strong bond with the parents who raised me, and I had anything but a happy childhood. My mother was overly sensitive; my father, ascetic. I was neither. I felt as if I were living with complete strangers. I suspect that my parents felt the same way.

Hair color is the easiest way to change your appearance, but a bad dye job might draw more attention to you.

When I was 6, I learned where I came from, which was one step removed from the usual circumstances. I was adopted.

I worked for a private investigative agency briefly. I rarely had the opportunity to snoop.

I tend to start books with a very broad outline, but I always leave room for happy accidents. With ‘The Passenger,’ there were perhaps too many of those.

I love ‘The Wire’. I can’t think of a television show that I think is superior to it in any way. I was obsessed with it from the moment it came on the air. I do also love ‘Doctor Who’ and ‘Get Smart’.

I liked the idea of exposing the beams in collaborative novel. And there are many – especially in the crime world – there are many people working together: James Patterson and his stable of sub authors; and then there are like Ken Bruen and Reed Farrel Coleman and Jason Starr.

I wrote my first screenplay on a lark, because it was a storytelling format that felt like a familiar shorthand – we all watch movies, don’t we? But even though I grew up in Los Angeles, my family was entirely unconnected with the movie industry, and I never truly believed that it would one day be my fate.

For more than three months, I had been president and primary owner of Spellman Investigations, and I can say with complete certainty that I had more power in this office as an underling. My title, it seemed, was purely decorative. I was captain of an unfashionable and sinking ship.

There’s no reason why a writer shouldn’t explore and use different genres.

I don’t feel like I’m a writer who works under any influence.

I wrote the first draft of ‘Plan B’ the summer after I turned 21.

You can’t be suspicious 24/7. It’s too exhausting.

‘Await Your Reply’ by Dan Chaon. I’ve always been obsessed with the idea of disappearing and becoming someone else. Even if you don’t share that obsession, I can’t recommend this book highly enough.

I am a huge Mel Brooks fan. And I do think that not seeing his canon of classics is a bit criminal or clueless.

I have certain rules for snooping, under which anything out in the open is fair game. But I also think, in light of some current trends in our culture, that privacy should be respected.

‘The Chosen,’ if you recall, was based on the Chaim Potok novel and featured Robbie Benson’s persuasive performance as a Hasidic Jew.

I loved writing the Spellman novels, but I never had any plan to only write in one genre.

Although I’m not an orphan and I can’t lift a horse. I was, however, briefly famous for my feats of strength: at about age 11, I could competitively arm-wrestle a full-grown man.

I’d like to think that if I were in prison for a crime I didn’t commit, someone would be trying to get me the hell out of there.

I’ve got no business giving advice to anyone. Even a fictional character.

I’m not a huge fan of research, but sometimes you get an idea, and then you realize you don’t know anything.

I wouldn’t say that my family is normal.

I was never obsessed with being adopted. I was simply curious about my biological parents.

My writing process is chaos. I usually start with an overarching theme. Then I establish several story threads, but I don’t outline. I just start writing and keep notes for what may come. It’s an organic process that’s usually pretty flexible.

The sense of not knowing where I came from let me be as smart as I wanted to be.

Band I listen to most: The Ramones.

I usually have a sense of where my characters are personally and ways in which they might transform throughout the novel. But I never know at the outset how the book will end, nor do I ever stick to my original plan.

Finally, I’m recognizing that rewrites aren’t some cosmic punishment for childhood wrongs but the nature of the business.

I investigate more directly. I tend to ask a lot of questions and don’t feel satisfied until I have the answer.

My mother, at sixty, is one of those classic beauties: all neck and cheekbones, sharp lines that hide her wrinkles from a distance. She still gets whistles from construction workers from three stories up.

While I had no intention of ending the series after ‘The Spellmans Strike Again,’ I did close many doors in that book and, with the fifth one, I was opening a lot of doors and not finding anything behind them and then opening another door and another until I found something. It was a while before I found my stride.

If you’re trying to hide, avoid using your own name. Have a couple spares that you can pull out of your pocket anytime, the more thoroughly documented the better.

I was on a few surveillance jobs as part of a big team. I would be the person to follow the subject on foot when the need arose. But most of the time, we were sitting in a car doing nothing.

I have a love/hate relationship with jogging.