Novelist Quotes

Character builds slowly, but it can be torn down within incredible swiftness.

The military is a very cool world to write about. I went down to Ft. Benning, Ga., for military training, and I learned a lot about soldiers and officers and why they joined up and what their life has been like.

Some people take 10 years to write a book and some can do one in under a year.

People who have expertise just love to share it. That's human nature.

People have given me classified information, but always with the disclaimer 'This can never end up in a book.' And it never does.

Most people associate reading with laying on the beach. They don't see that it's crucial for a democracy!

In every thriller written about Washington, particularly after 9/11, there are good guys and there are bad guys, and there's no gray area at all.

I'm tired of people screaming about price and forgetting about the content.

I'm ever curious about the world. I'm driven to go out and find new things to write about. Having a vivid imagination is also a plus.

I'm a wicked ping-pong player.

I'd read a lot of thrillers about politicians and presidents, but never one where you flip the stereotypes and make good people bad and bad people good.

I look for material that both interest me and challenges me. If I am drawn to the material and I have to work hard at it, the characters and the plots reflect the hours and hours of research.

Fiction is sort of a way to set the record straight, and let people at least believe that justice can be achieved and the right outcomes can occur.

But protagonists are protagonists and heroes are heroes.

But if I worried too much about publishers' expectations, I'd probably paralyze myself and not be able to write anything.

Why waste time trying to discover the truth, when you can so easily create it?

I'm driven to go out and find new things to write about.

I'm scattered, and then that last hundred pages, bam, I'm a laser.

As a lawyer, as a private citizen, you see a lot of injustice. You see a lot of people who should have been punished and are not, and people who were punished wrongfully are not vindicated. Fiction is sort of a way to set the record straight, and let people at least believe that justice can be achie

That was the problem with reading: you always had to pick up again at the very thing that had made you stop reading the day before.

Shoes are the first adult machines we are given to master.

Rarely do pens go dry in restaurants.

I no longer want to live in an apartment furnished with forklifts and backhoes.

For me, as a beginning novelist, all other living writers form a control group for whom the world is a placebo.

Until a friend or relative has applied a particular proverb to your own life, or until you've watched him apply the proverb to his own life, it has no power to sway you.

Haven't you felt a peculiar sort of worry about the chair in your living room that no one sits in?

Spoon the sauce over the ice cream. It will harden. This is what you have been working for.

When I got a telly we had no aerial, but I discovered that if I or one of the children stood by it you could get a picture. So I had to make a statue that could stand by the telly.

It seems to me that a mutually beneficial relationship between a man and woman requires the man to be dominant. A sensible woman will allow the man to think he is the most important partner.

I've never been drawn to the feminist movement. I was brought up to believe that men had little to do with the home or children - except to bring in the money.