Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I'm ashamed how little science fiction I've read.
I thought labs were such cinematic, spooky spaces.
I don't really consider any of my novels 'crime' novels.
It feels like breaking rules is almost a given now on TV.
On 'The Deuce,' the writers' room gets like group therapy.
If it hadn't been what it was, it would've been beautiful.
I'm always fascinated by how different writers' rooms work.
I come from a family of readers. Our house smelled of book.
There's something dangerous about the boredom of teenage girls.
Novels are so interior and idiosyncratic and such a solitary process.
If I have a writing problem, the minute I step away, there's a solution.
I think watching TV has influenced my books, but I don't think writing TV has.
I never quite know how to fill that anxious, semi-wasted time before a midday flight home.
I think it was Freud who said that we're all arrested at a certain age. For me, it was always 13.
I think there's a concept that crime fiction is or was male-dominated, but it really never has been.
I will read anything at all by Kate Atkinson, Daniel Woodrell, and William Kennedy, who are all fearless.
I don't think I could write a book that had an ideological plan going in - I think that would be a terrible book.
There's this notion of women's bodies being out of control - so out of control that men don't understand it at all.
I'm always surprised at the negative response to the women in my books who are openly ambitious or experience aggression.
I think we writers are very superstitious. We don't know why it's working when it's working, so we attach cause and effect.
I've come to believe that what draws women to true crime tales is an instinctual understanding that this is the world they live in.
True crime has long been a passion for me, but I'm also a sucker for biographies, particularly of politicians, writers, or Hollywood icons.
The speed of the TV stuff vs. the self-imposed pace of novel writing has been a big adjustment, and going back and forth often feels like whiplash.
In the world of book writing, there's a few people, maybe, where you have close relationships. In TV, there are so many more relationships, and they're all so critical.
No, this is throwing up like coming off the tilt-a-whirl at age seven, like discovering that dead rat under the porch, like finding out someone you loved never loved you at all.
I've consumed true crime since first discovering 'Helter Skelter' by Vincent Bugliosi in a used bookstore at age 9 or 10 and staring in fascination and horror at the crime-scene photos in the middle.
The more I did it-the more it owned me. It made things matter. It put a spine into my spineless life and that spine spread, into backbone, ribs, collarbone, neck held high. It was something. Don't say it wasn't.
I am an insomniac. I wake up at 6 or 6:30 and get out of bed immediately. The coffee starts right away. Then I get to the computer as quickly as possible. I like to start writing when I'm still half-asleep, in a state between dreaming and waking.
When 'Dare Me' was first in development, it was hard to make the case for why it'd be interesting to anybody other than teenage girls. It'd often be treated, like, on first glance, 'What is this? 'Pretty Little Liars?' 'Mean Girls?'' It never was that.
I wrote my graduate thesis at New York University on hard-boiled fiction from the 1930s and 1940s, so, for about two years, I read nothing but Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, James Cain and Chester Himes. I developed such a love for this kind of writing.
I think there are two prevailing views of the suburbs in the States: either they're this sort of tedious place, where everyone is the same, buys the same food and drives around in their little minivans, or the view is that the suburbs are extremely perverse in a humorous way.
Reading Dorothy B. Hughes's novel 'In a Lonely Place' for the first time is like finding the long-lost final piece to an enormous puzzle. Within its Spanish bungalows, its eucalyptus-scented shadows, you feel as though you've discovered a delicious and dark secret, a tantalizing page-turner with sneakily subversive undercurrents.
Thrilling, illuminating, heart-pounding. Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy reads like a crackling espionage novel and resonates as only the most compelling history can. Abbott brings to vivid life four extraordinary and audacious women, and runs glorious roughshod over all our traditional notions of the role of women in the Civil War.
Reading Tomato Red-the first Daniel Woodrell novel I came upon-was a transformative experience. It expanded my sense of the possibilities not only of crime fiction, but of fiction itself-of language, of storytelling. Time and again, his work just dazzles and humbles me. God bless Busted Flush for these glorious reissues. It's a service to readers everywhere, and a great gift.
Because they do burn leaves here, the older folks do, and I remember now that I love it and always have. The way fall feels at night because of it, because of the crackling sound and walking around the sidewalks, like when you're a kid, and kicking those soft piles, and seeing smoke from backyards and Mr. Kilstrap standing over the metal drum with the holes in the top, the sparking embers at his feet.
I grew up reading crime fiction mysteries, true crime - a lot of true crime - and it is traditionally a male dominated field from the outside, but from the inside what we know, those of us who read it, is that women buy the most crime fiction, they are by far the biggest readers of true crime, and there's a voracious appetite among women for these stories, and I know I feel it - since I was quite small I wanted to go to those dark places.