Laura Lippman

Every person you meet has a story.

I love crime fiction, and I'm proud to be part of it, but I'm not without criticism for my own genre.

I was part of a generation where kids had a lot of freedom and aimless downtime. I had no scheduled after-school activities. As long as you came home for dinner, everything was fine.

I don't know where my phone is half the time.

Fiction needs writers and readers, and writers should cultivate both.

It doesn't feel like work. Yes, I have days that are difficult, but I'm sitting in a chair making up stories. It's what I did for fun as a kid, whether with Barbies or stuffed animals.

After I started writing crime fiction, I said to myself, 'I may be limited, but the genre's not. There's no reason to change genres if I'm happy writing what I write.' And I am.

I sometimes allow people to infer that I'm much less successful than I am.

The verbs that are used for people who write quickly are almost never flattering.

I never knew how passive-aggressive people could be until I became a parent. Or even aggressive-aggressive. It actually began before I had a child. A relative asked me out to lunch and told me I was too old for motherhood.

If I waited to be inspired to go to the gym, I'd never get there. I schedule my exercise time; I schedule my work time. This is especially important if you have a day job as I did while writing my first seven novels.

Writing is a sedentary gig unless one has a treadmill desk. But I have long believed writing and working out are complementary disciplines.

Baltimore has been a punchline/punching bag for years - I've landed a few blows, to be fair - but those old jokes are out of touch.

I spent grades one through nine in Baltimore City, leaving for reasons that had nothing to do with the quality of education I was receiving.

I'm very empathetic - that might be one of my superpowers.

For me, crime fiction was an opportunity to sneak up on readers with social issues, something they won't go out of their way to seek.

Anyone can love a perfect place. Loving Baltimore takes some resilience.

People still struggle with this notion of gifted writers somehow being in touch with a higher power, but it's all about showing up and doing the job, meeting deadlines, working hard.

I like books steeped in the quotidian - details about work and place. You can learn how to run a chicken-and-waffle restaurant by reading 'Mildred Pierce.' And I like fiction about money.

In my newspaper days, your endings could be literally sliced off in the composing room, so it was dangerous to get attached to them. Yet I think this has made me work harder on endings in fiction.

I think Baltimore suffers from nostalgia and it keeps us from being honest in talking about what really happened here. A place doesn't have to be perfect to be beloved, and I love this city and I love it better for seeing its flaws.

I think I'm part of a generation of crime writers all of whom woke up independently and recoiled with horror at the fact that we'd chosen this very conservative genre.

I've gotten to do a lot of stuff, traveled, worked hard at my career.

Edward Eager wrote a series of children's books that are in danger of being forgotten. But they're divine: stories about ordinary kids who stumble on magical things - a coin, a lake, a book, a thyme garden, a well. The magic changes them, they try to change the magic, the magic moves on.

I've long believed that the work-out life has lessons for the writing life. I've 'solved' a lot of books while at the gym, in part because I'm not trying to solve them at that precise moment.