Top 36 Quotes by Robert Crais

I had a big Akita, Yoshi, who was fabulous. I loved him. We lost him when he was 12, and I've never been able to replace him. Normally, most people lose a pet and get another and keep going on. But it just felt wrong to me; it felt disloyal.

I began to encounter real-life stories of dogs protecting their wounded or dying or dead handler... or dogs refusing to leave the bodies of the people they were bonded to, sitting in cemeteries for days or sometimes weeks. You find these stories endlessly.

What they smell isn't the emotion of fear. What dogs can smell is the changes in a person's skin that suggest fear to the dog, anxiety, the way your skin sweats, the amount of uric acid that suddenly pours out of your pores.

My fiction is almost always inspired by a character's need or desire to rise above him- or herself. No one is perfect and some of us have much adversity in our lives; it is those people who struggle to rise above their nature or background that I find the most interesting and heroic.

I had wanted to be a novelist for so long, but I didn't have a story. That story came from the death of my father, and wrestling with how to help my mother. Writing it allowed me to work through my fears, frustrations and desires. I wanted control over the situation. And I wasn't sure I would have any in real life.

I'll bet you $10 right now that there are an awful lot of literary writers who started a long time ago and now they find themselves in this place where secretly they feel trapped. And you know what they really read for fun? They read crime fiction.