Top 25 Chelsea Cain Quotes

I am a control freak, but not when I travel. For some reason when I travel, I am able to surrender more than in my real life. I am able to let go. I think it’s why I like it so much.

Every year, I give my dad an advance copy of my latest book. He reads it over the next several nights and says something incredibly supportive. Then he clears his throat nervously and changes the subject.

My husband and I were excited about having a kid – it was having a baby that had us worried. We had a lot to learn, so like good liberal arts graduates, we signed up for a class.

I’d lived in Portland on and off for a decade before I’d even heard of Vanport. It was this town of 20,000 people that washed away from north Portland.

People come to Portland, many of them for the quality of life. They love the physical space here. And yet every year, people climbing the mountain get killed by avalanches.

I’ve always been more interested in what happens after the bad thing has happened – the fallout of the bad thing, when people are already damaged. I’m less interested in seeing people when they’re fine and following their journey to becoming damaged.

As a seven-year-old, I remember when Etan Patz disappeared and was immortalized as the first missing-child face on a milk carton.

Of the paperbacks that you see at the airport, I am the most violent woman writer.

I used to write travel essays, and I was struck by how the fact of writing about a place would change my relationship with it. I would make completely different choices, do things I wouldn’t have normally, because I had to fill this narrative shape.

No matter what fabulous place I visit, I don’t feel like I’m on vacation unless I’m dehydrated and covered with sunscreen.

I read a lot fewer thrillers than I think people assume I do.

I’ve written books for awhile, but always on a pretty small scale and always pretty self-indulgent. I chose projects that I thought would be really fun to work on and found friends to work on them with me, and it was all about the process.

I was a library rat and a bookworm. I read all the time. I walked to school reading books. I read under my desk.

I’m a sucker for a screwed-up protagonist. We all have issues.

I was pregnant with my daughter when I started writing my first thriller, so I guess you could blame hormones.

When I say that I went to grad school in Iowa City, people often assume that I went to the famed writers’ workshop MFA program at the University of Iowa. I didn’t. I got a master’s in journalism.

I was obsessed with Val McDermid’s Tony Hill and Carol Jordan books, delightfully twisted stuff.

I have traveled a fair amount, and I have visited some great cities. I love architecture and museums and castles and ruins and central markets and even double-decker bus tours. But, I am a sucker for a tropical beach.

Memory is a fiction we tell ourselves: just a piece of the truth.

I often keep my eyes open for bodies. I do. Ever since I was a kid. I think I read too many ‘Nancy Drew’ books.

I’m usually too shy to write on planes because I assume that everyone on board is as nosy as I am and will look over my shoulder and read what I’m writing.

I grew up in Washington State and then eventually found my way back to Iowa City for grad school.

I love to write just about more than anything, but there are times I have to force myself to sit down and work. I want to play with my daughter or watch a movie with my husband or go outside on the nicest day of the year. But if writing is going to be your job, you have to treat it like a job.

There’s not a lot of arc in an actual psychopath.

I guess people might be surprised to know I read comic books. I’m a Marvel girl, as opposed to DC.