Author Quotes

I lost some time once. It's always in the last place you look for it.

It is a fool's prerogative to utter truths that no one else will speak.

Life - and I don't suppose I'm the first to make this comparison - is a disease: sexually transmitted, and invariably fatal.

This is a work of fiction. All the characters in it, human and otherwise, are imaginary, excepting only certain of the fairy folk, whom it might be unwise to offend by casting doubts on their existence. Or lack thereof.

I'm one of those writers who tends to be really good at making outlines and sticking to them. I'm very good at doing that, but I don't like it. It sort of takes a lot of the fun out.

Things need not have happened to be true. Tales and adventures are the shadow truths that will endure when mere facts are dust and ashes and forgotten.

Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up.

The one thing that you have that nobody else has is you. Your voice, your mind, your story, your vision. So write and draw and build and play and dance and live as only you can.

You get ideas from daydreaming. You get ideas from being bored. You get ideas all the time. The only difference between writers and other people is we notice when we're doing it.

Maybe people become bitter when they don't know what they are fighting for. But I keep my eyes open.

Marriage is not common in Sweden.

I'm not violent, I don't believe in killing people, but standing up for yourself, speaking out against injustice, is another form of vengeance.

When you're reading, you're not where you are; you're in the book. By the same token, I can write anywhere.

What underlies great science is what underlies great art, whether it is visual or written, and that is the ability to distinguish patterns out of chaos.

Well, I can't remember not being able to read. I was told I could read by myself very well at the age of three.

People assume that science is a very cold sort of profession, whereas writing novels is a warm and fuzzy intuitive thing. But in fact, they are not at all different.

I work late at night. I'm awake and nobody bothers me. It's quiet and things come and talk to me in the silence.

I read all the time. People ask, 'Do you read while you work?' And I say, 'I better.' I take two or three years to finish one of my enormous books, and I can't go that long without reading.

I have no objection to well-written romance, but I'd read enough of it to know that that's not what I had written. I also knew that if it was sold as romance I'd never be reviewed by the 'New York Times' or any other literarily respectable newspaper - which is basically true, although the 'Washingto

I don't plot the books out ahead of time, I don't plan them. I don't begin at the beginning and end at the end. I don't work with an outline and I don't work in a straight line.

Conflict and character are the heart of good fiction, and good mystery has both of those in spades.

My job is to have empathy and curiosity for things that I've never done. Also, I'm a person whom people talk to.

My father died in my arms. That's tumult. That's everything exploding.

Maybe I'm a serial regional writer. First here, then there, across the map.

Married life requires shared mystery even when all the facts are known.

Literature has as one of its principal allures that it tells you something about life that life itself can't tell you. I just thought literature is a thing that human beings do.

It's interesting to leave a place, interesting even to think about it. Leaving reminds us of what we can part with and what we can't, then offers us something new to look forward to, to dream about.

In order to write novels for a living - it's not pathological, but I do think and worry and brood and fidget about stuff that I'm working on.

If I could have married my wife and been a sports writer for the past 30 years, I wouldn't be sitting here - but I don't think I'd be sitting someplace where I was sorry to be sitting.

I've been mainly a happy boy in my life. I married the right girl and we did what we wanted to do.