Top 50 Donna Leon Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I find the idea of vigilante justice very attractive. I like the idea that the murderer decides that this person has gone too far, and nothing will happen to him unless she does something to stop him.”

— Donna Leon

2. “I think reading a translation is an act of faith.”

— Donna Leon

3. “Italians know about human nature – they understand human nature perhaps better than anyone else does. They know that people are weak and greedy and lazy and dishonest and they just try to make the best of it; to work around it.”

— Donna Leon

4. “And I don’t want to live anywhere where I am famous. It makes me very, very uncomfortable, because it conveys an advantage over people, and I don’t like that.”

— Donna Leon

5. “And off in the far distance, the gold on the wings of the angel atop the bell tower of San Marco flashed in the sun, bathing the entire city in its glistening benediction.”

— Donna Leon

6. “The Germans and Austrians are very polite, the Swiss are very reserved and the Spanish usually kiss me. The Brits write me letters.”

— Donna Leon

7. “I do not take any pleasure whatsoever in being a famous person.”

— Donna Leon

8. “I was extraordinarily lucky. I wrote a book because I wanted to see if I could write a mystery. Someone nagged me into sending it to a contest, which it won, after which I was offered a two-book contract, thus requiring the writing of a second book.”

— Donna Leon

9. “Patta’s expression seemed cordial enough, though from past experience Brunetti knew this was meaningless: vipers liked to bask on rocks in the sunshine, did they not?”

— Donna Leon

10. “I just go to lunch. And I never know when something is going into the file and something is not.”

— Donna Leon

11. “How beautiful, the grace of women; how soft their charity.”

— Donna Leon

12. “Why are other people’s prejudices so strange, while our own are so thought-out and reasonable?”

— Donna Leon

13. “Oh, so seldom does fate cast our enemy into our hands, to do with as we will.”

— Donna Leon

14. “So much of contemporary crime fiction is painful to read and obsessed with violence, particularly against women, and I can’t read that.”

— Donna Leon

15. “All through graduate school, instead of having a television I read murder mysteries: Hammett, Chandler, Ruth Rendell, P. D. James.”

— Donna Leon

16. “I don’t go to the movies because I don’t like films.”

— Donna Leon

17. “I love music. But I’ve never owned a TV in my adult life, and I’ve never lived in a place with a television.”

— Donna Leon

18. “A story begins and it always passes from the subjunctive to the declarative. And Italians don’t seem to care about making a fine distinction between that which is speculation and that which is fact.”

— Donna Leon

19. “I never wanted to be rich or successful or famous. I just wanted to be happy and have fun.”

— Donna Leon

20. “I have always had a particular antagonism for the military.”

— Donna Leon

21. “The ending is one of my blackest, utterly without hope of any sort.”

— Donna Leon

22. “I think people prefer to remember happy times, well, happier times, and if they can’t remember them, then to change the memories and make them happier.”

— Donna Leon

23. “My father read ‘The New York Times,’ my mother did secretarial work, we had a dog, we had a garden, I had a brother.”

— Donna Leon

24. “I know you shouldn’t spit in your own soup but I think most crime writing is like TV and doesn’t make enormous demands on one’s intellect.”

— Donna Leon

25. “Sit around the bars, talked to people, ate in the restaurants, and chatted with the old ladies on the street. Fishermen are pretty much that way.”

— Donna Leon

26. “I was at La Fenice opera house back in 1991 with friends, and we started talking about a conductor whom none of us liked. Somehow there was an escalation, and we started talking about how to kill him, where to kill him. This struck me as a good idea for a book.”

— Donna Leon

27. “Only the good deserve to hope.”

— Donna Leon

28. “Most people – however much they might deny it – had an idea of what they were getting into when they got into it.”

— Donna Leon

29. “Venetians feel affection and loyalty to their city, rather than to the Italian state.”

— Donna Leon

30. “Lampedusa had it right – things had to seem to change so that things could remain the same.”

— Donna Leon

31. “He hesitated then, anticipating the panic that came when there was nothing left to read.”

— Donna Leon

32. “For reasons he had never understood, she read a different newspaper each morning, spanning the political spectrum from right to left, and languages from French to English. Years ago, when he had first met her and understood her even less, he had asked about this. Her response, he came to realize only years later, made perfect sense: ‘I want to see how many different ways the same lies can be told.’ Nothing he had read in the ensuing years had come close to suggesting that her approach was wrong.”

— Donna Leon

33. “I never know what’s going to happen in a novel. I don’t have a plan or an outline.”

— Donna Leon

34. “Beauty was where you found it, and it was always comforting to see.”

— Donna Leon

35. “Italian to the core, he did not for an instant doubt that a man could be passionately devoted to the wife he betrayed with other women.”

— Donna Leon

36. “Women don’t use knives,’ Griffoni answered, reciting it as though she were Euclid listing another axiom. Although he agreed with her, Brunetti was curious about the basis for her belief. ‘You offering proof of that?’ ‘Kitchens,’ she said laconically. ‘Kitchens?’ ‘The knives are kept in the kitchen, and their husbands pass through there every day, countless times, yet very few of them get stabbed. That’s because women don’t use knives, and they don’t stab people.”

— Donna Leon

37. “We are a nation of egoists. It is our glory, but it will be our destruction, for none of us can be made to concern ourselves about something as abstract as “the common good”. The best of us can rise to feeling concern for our families, but as a nation we are incapable of more.”

— Donna Leon

38. “As if sensing his attention, Paola turned her head towards him and allowed her eyes to close and then open slowly, as though she’d been told that the Crucifixion had only just begun and there still remained a number of nails. The.”

— Donna Leon

39. “Brunetti had long been of the opinion that one of the handicaps of stupidity was its inability to imagine intelligence.”

— Donna Leon

40. “Life had taught him to be profoundly suspicious of coincidence, and it had similarly taught him to view any seemingly random conjunction of events or persons as coincidence and thus be suspicious of that, as well.”

— Donna Leon

41. “Pucetti’s was the generation that was all in favour of sentiment, sharing other people’s pain, voicing compassion for the downtrodden, yet Brunetti often found in them traces of a ruthlessness that chilled his spirit and made him fearful for the future. He wondered if the cheap sentimentality of television and film had sent them into some sort of emotional insulin shock and suffocated their ability to feel empathy with the unappealing victims of the mess that real life created.”

— Donna Leon

42. “Perception of personal danger very often set people on the path of virtue.”

— Donna Leon

43. “His clothing marked him as Italian. The cadence of his speech announced that he was Venetian. His eyes were all policeman.”

— Donna Leon

44. “He dealt every day with people who believed they weren’t happy and who further believed that by committing some crime – theft, murder, deceit, blackmail, even kidnapping – they would find the magic elixir that would transform the perceived misery of their lives into that most desired of states: happiness.”

— Donna Leon

45. “Her mask gave no sign of how this affected her.”

— Donna Leon

46. “I read books, not minds, Guido.”

— Donna Leon

47. “They hadn’t lived long enough to understand what grace it was to die in an instant and not to linger.”

— Donna Leon

48. “Don’t you have any desire for vengeance?” he asked before he remembered that she wasn’t Italian.”

— Donna Leon

49. “Why bother to put the boy who broke into a house in jail when the man who stole billions from the health system is named ambassador to the country to which he had been sending the money for years?”

— Donna Leon

50. “Even if exile is spent in the most beautiful city in the world, Brunetti realized, it is still exile.”

— Donna Leon