I’m a dinosaur, he thought, lumbering through a world where truthtellersare despised.

— Tess Gerritsen

I met my husband, Jacob, in medical school. We married and went to live in Hawaii where his family lived. It was very beautiful, but I wasn't used to being on an island and needed wide open spaces. Eventually we moved to Maine, New England.

— Tess Gerritsen

I think of myself as a fairly logical, scientific and somewhat reserved person. Maura Isles, the Boston medical examiner who appears in five of my books, is me. Almost everything I use in describing her, from her taste in wine to her biographical data, is taken from my own family. Except I don't have a serial killer as a mother!

— Tess Gerritsen

I think what medical training does is it gives you the language, the tools to look up facts. I think medical training gives you a sense of how to approach a problem, how to look at symptoms and go down the list of what it might be.

— Tess Gerritsen

It's just something I'll have to live with... The possibility of getting sick. Not knowing if I'll live another two years or forty years. I keep telling myself, I could walk outside and get hit by a bus. That's the way life is. Just surviving another day comes with its own risk.

— Tess Gerritsen

I was a writer first, and knew I'd be a storyteller at age seven. But since my parents are very practical, they urged me to go into a profession that would be far more secure, so I went to medical school.

— Tess Gerritsen

My dad's cooking was magic in the kitchen. But eventually over the years, his personality changed and his ability to remember recipes failed. He became paranoid and thought people were stealing from him, when often he was just misplacing things.

— Tess Gerritsen

My dad was Chinese-American and very conservative when it came to his family's futures. He said if I wanted to have a secure job, I should go into science. So I did what Dad said and went to medical school, but the writing bug never left me.

— Tess Gerritsen

No matter how much you try to maintain order in your life, no matter how careful you are to guard against mistakes, against imperfections, there is always some smudge, some flaw, lurking out of sight. Waiting to surprise you.

— Tess Gerritsen

One of the best Christmas presents I ever got was the globe that I now keep right beside my desk.

— Tess Gerritsen