Novelist Quotes

Many receive advice, only the wise profit from it.

I think there's just one kind of folks. Folks.

The book to read is not the one which thinks for you, but the one which makes you think. No book in the world equals the Bible for that.

Real courage is when you know you're licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what.

The Term Paper Artist' represents two models of writing, one of the little boy bouncing his ball, generating stories for the sheer pleasure of it, and the besieged adult, writing to make a living, having to contend with a very competitive, very unreliable world in which public image counts.

Obviously any fiction is going to be a combination of what is invented, what is overheard, what is experienced, what is experienced by people close to you, what you are told, what you have read, all mixed together into this kind of soup which, like any good soup, at the end you cannot really disting

It was an instinct to put the world in order that powered her mending split infinitives and snipping off dangling participles, smoothing away the knots and bumps until the prose before her took on a sheen, like perfect caramel.

It is so common to write autobiographical fiction in which your own experience is thinly disguised.

In a memoir, I think, the contract implies a certain degree of truth. I think you have to be as true to your memory and your experience as you possibly can.

Having reached a point in which I was so bitter and exhausted from being a quote unquote public figure, I wanted to return to a more childlike relationship to writing.

Childhood smells of perfume and brownies.

When I say 'work' I only mean writing. Everything else is just odd jobs.

You can write a great book and be ignored. Literary history is full of classics that were under-appreciated in their own time.

When I was 30 or so - by that time I had become an assistant D.A. - I decided I would try to write a novel. To be clear: I did not decide to become a novelist. Honestly, it never crossed my mind that I could actually earn a living as a professional novelist.

Well, I outline fanatically. I am a long thinker and a slow writer, though I am trying to get faster.

Probably careful plotting reflects my personality. I am meticulous by nature. I can't imagine speed-writing anything that happens to pop into my head.

I'm a bit of a tech geek myself.

I love sports, as all Bostonians seem to. I love books and movies, as all writers seem to.

I don't ever write with a particular audience in mind. I just write books that please me.

I can't say that I ever actually decided to become a writer. It kind of snuck up on me.

I am interested in computers and technology, and art, photography, and design.

Good stories are driven by conflict, tension, and high stakes.

Genes are not simple triggers. No one is hardwired to commit murder or any other crime. Our actions are always the result of stupendously complex gene-environment interactions, and environment is likely to remain the more important influence by far.

Crime and legal stories, broadly speaking, are just where my interest happens to lie.

The architecture of our future is not only unfinished; the scaffolding has hardly gone up.

Conversion for me was not a Damascus Road experience. I slowly moved into an intellectual acceptance of what my intuition had always known.

A book comes and says, 'Write me.' My job is to try to serve it to the best of my ability, which is never good enough, but all I can do is listen to it, do what it tells me and collaborate.

With each book I write, I become more and more convinced that the books have a life of their own, quite apart from me.

We can't take any credit for our talents. It's how we use them that counts.

Inspiration usually comes during work, rather than before it.