Ann Cleeves Quotes

A library is a room where the murders take place.

A locked-room problem lies at the heart of my new novel, 'In The Morning I'll Be Gone,' in which an RUC detective has to find out whether a publican's daughter who fell off a table in a bar that was locked from the inside was in fact murdered.

The sphinx will always have to be looked after.

Not a single piece of material culture - not a single object - has been found at Giza that can be interpreted to come from a lost civilization.

For years I've wanted to write a book about mummies, and had been following the science of mummy CT scans when the premise for 'The Keepsake' occurred to me: what if an 'ancient' mummy turns out to have a bullet in its leg? How does a modern murder victim get turned into a mummy?

As an undergraduate, I had an opportunity to go on a number of archeological digs. So I had experience excavating, digging up remains of ancient Indian villages in the Midwest and in the Southwest.

At Olduvai, for 20 years, Mary and I had investigated and made a general survey of the overall geology.

When we find something new at Giza, we announce it to the world. The Sphinx and the Pyramids are world treasures. We are the guardian's of these treasures, but they belong to the world.

The Thames could be thought of as England's longest archaeological site, and no fewer than 90,000 objects recovered from its foreshore are in the collection of the Museum of London, whose 30-year relationship with London mudlarks is both committed and highly regulated.

Antiquities are history defaced, or some remnants of history which have casually escaped the shipwreck of time.

I keep being surprised by the amount of archaeological sites and features that are left to find all over the world.

One should not forget that there are very few surviving items from this period, often just single, small bones, a tooth, a sliver of the skull. Categorizing these pieces can be very difficult.

The most exciting moment as an archaeologist happened when I was looking at the great archaeology site of Tannis, which of course we all know from 'Indiana Jones.' We got satellite imagery of the city of Tannis, we processed it, and literally from thousands of miles away from my lab in Alabama, we were able to map the entire city.

The most exciting part of what I do is understanding the scale of what we don't know. There are just countless archaeological sites all over the world, and one of the most important and best ways of finding them is using digital technology.

Just as a fossil is 'petrified time,' so is an ancient artifact or text.

The tasks of paleontologists and classical historians and archaeologists are remarkably similar - to excavate, decipher and bring to life the tantalizing remnants of a time we will never see.

I developed 'Trapped' because I was fascinated with the idea of a terrible crime in a small town cut off from the rest of the world.

Among the best of Hitchcock's own psychological thrillers is 'Spellbound,' whose story unusually wrapped the subject of psychoanalysis around a murder mystery.

The Italians have had 2,000 years to fix up the Forum and just look at the place!

I like murder mysteries, the Agatha Christie kinds of things where you know that it's all going to be neatly wound up at the end.

I do love these ancient ruins. We never tread upon them but we set Our foot upon some reverend history.

...and then a murder mystery will occur.

In detective stories . . . I alternately identify myself with the murderer and the huntsman-detective, but . . . there are those to which this vicarious outlet is too mild.

Our law enforcement agencies have found bodies in the desert, either buried or just lying out there, that have been beheaded.

If I was wealthy I'd never do anything but poke around in ruined cities all over the world - and probably get snake-bit.