Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I came from this very traditional background and I benefited hugely from feminism. I felt privileged going to university and doing a PhD. Most people of my background don't get to do that.
For a much lauded writer, I'm not terribly self-absorbed. In social situations, which are difficult for me - I mean, this is an interview - I'm normally uncomfortable talking about myself.
When I was in second grade, my mother moved from Miami to this evangelical conservative environment in western North Carolina, two miles down the road from Billy Graham and his wife, Ruth.
When I was at college there were two things I vowed I'd never do. One was go to a funeral and the other was deal with computers. And then I ended up being a computer programmer in a morgue.
When you are around 60, there are certain things that are completely terrifying. One of them is that you have made the wrong choices in life, and now it's too late to do anything about them.
I am, of course, a frustrated rock star - I'd much rather be a rock star than a writer. Or own a record shop. Still, it's not a bad life, is it? You just sit at a computer and make stuff up.
'Jekyll and Hyde' I read in high school. I was expecting a Hollywood-type horror story and couldn't believe it when I got this very complex narrative from all these different points of view.
Throat clutching from the outset! The Never List stands as a sterling example of psychological thriller writing at its best. Cancel appointments and give up on sleep. It's that kind of book.
Because I write a book a year, I always want to do one other project every year that's stimulating in a different way. It means you can be working but not using up your prose juice, you know?
To answer that I have to describe what I think is my responsibility as a thriller writer: To give my readers the most exciting roller coaster ride of a suspense story I can possibly think of.
The new century will see unimaginable levels of wastefulness and extravagance, but it will also be an age in which the individual human being acquires a true and universally recognised value.
No matter how many awards you've won or how many sales you've got, come the next book it's still a blank sheet of paper and you're still panicking like hell that you've got nothing new to say.
I am a very radical person - as radical now as I was when I was younger. So my books all have in common my search for understanding of the terrible world we are living in and ways to change it.
I am not afraid of dying. I have lived longer than most people in the world. What scares me is to have a body that works but a brain that is waving goodbye. If that happens, I hope I die quickly.
At the time of independence in 1975, Mozambique was extremely poor. Many Portuguese residents abandoned the country, leaving only a handful of well-educated Mozambicans to try to run the country.
I wrote my first short story for a competition and won second prize. Another competition came up and I won first prize. The first story was published in a newspaper. The second went out on radio.
Though a good cop, Luc Claudel has the patience of a firecracker, the sensitivity of Vlad the Impaler, and a persistent skepticism as to the value of forensic anthropology. Snappy dresser, though.
I took my .38 out and looked to see that there were bullets in all the proper places. I knew there would be, but it did no harm to be careful. And I'd seen Clint Eastwood do it once in the movies.
Sweden is still a very peaceful country to live in. I think that people in Britain have created this mythology about Sweden, that it's a perfect democratic society full of erotically charged girls.
I work every day until I do not have more to say. I learned from Graham Greene that a very good way is to stop work in the middle of a sentence. Then you know exactly how to continue the day after.
Noir is dead for me because historically, I think it's a simple view. I've taken it as far as it can go. I think I've expanded on it a great deal, taken it further than any other American novelist.
I don't want to recover from writing this book [The Onion]. I feel very poised. I feel like I'm with my mother for the first time ever. I feel like I've confronted her, and the confrontation goes on.
Has anyone ever told you," I said, "that you coalesce reality?" "No. They only say that I'm good in the sack." "They are accurate but limited," I said. "And if you give me their names I'll kill them.
Six Seconds is a great read. Echoing Ludlum and Forsythe, author Mofina has penned a big, solid international thriller that grabs your gut -- and your heart -- in the opening scenes and never lets go.
It was not just that Ross Macdonald taught us how to write; he did something much more, he taught us how to read, and how to think about life, and maybe, in some small, but mattering way, how to live.
We all present versions of ourselves. The person you are at work is not the same person you are at home. The face we present in our most intimate relationships is not the face we present to the world.
I had achieved the most important things in my life when I married Joan and had the sons. Given the choice between Joan and the boys, and being a writer, I world give up being a writer without a blink.
There's something about being able to literally consume a work of art - then to divide all that pleasure of it - because it's a memory. A great wine for me is a memory, it's an extraordinary experience.
There is always a sacred hour in the theatre - after rehearsals and before performances, in the afternoon, between three and five o'clock. Normally the theatre is empty then, and this is a wonderful hour.
As much as I transferred my mother to Elizabeth Shore of The Black Dahlia, as much as her dad mutated into an obsession with crime in general, well, I have thought about other things throughout the years.
Sometimes during the two-year curriculum, every MBA student ought to hear it clearly stated that numbers, techniques, and analysis are all side matters. What is central to business is the joy of creating.
In Africa, listening is a guiding principle. It's a principle that's been lost in the constant chatter of the Western world, where no one seems to have the time or even the desire to listen to anyone else.
I needed to find my way to write. I need about six hours of uninterrupted time in order to produce about two hours of writing, and when I accepted that and found the way to do it, then I was able to write.
You're grounded!!!! You can't go out and prowl the L.A. streets. You've got to do something more edifying, emboldening and altogether more groovy. You gots to stay home tonite and read a good book!!!!!!!!!!
Breathtakingly real and utterly compelling, Immoral dishes up page-turning psychological suspense while treating us lucky readers to some of the most literate and stylish writing you'll find anywhere today.
Periodically I just notch up. And everyone among my colleagues thinks that Perfidia - in its accessibility, its big throbbing heart - will be the biggest notch up yet. We'll see what happens. It's on my ass.
Have I ever written anything that has really changed something? What I believe is that you can't change anything without using art. I believe that the drops wear away the stone. I try to be part of that army.
I am conservative by temperament. I disapprove of criminal activity. I am very solidly and markedly on the side of authority. The truth is I would rather err on the side of too much authority than too little.
I was in L.A. in '08. It was a cold Saturday night. I had spread my phone number out to a score of women and was just indulging this sweet, sad, elegiac, bale loneliness - don't tell me you haven't been there.
My guys are morally weak, and they reach toward a tenuous knowledge of self-sacrifice, and sometimes it's too late. I find that moving. It's not a life I'd want to live. But, then, I'm not completely my books.
The Gospel that worked in the 20th Century may not work in the 21st Century. The reason is because it is truncated. It only speaks of "Sin and Salvation" and not of the COSMIC GOSPEL that transforms all things.
It's tempting to say the Ph.D. didn't have an effect, but it's not so. I think whatever resonance I may be able to achieve is in part simply from the amount of reading and learning that I acquired along the way
Fourteen years in the professor dodge has taught me that one can argue ingeniously on behalf of any theory, applied to any piece of literature. This is rarely harmful, because normally no-one reads such essays.
As a writer, I am an intellectual. I believe in the ideals of the Enlightenment, I believe in the written word, in dialogue and in truth. I hate lies more than anything else. Most of the time I react by writing.
My father thought, and now I think too, that the system of democracy is entirely based upon the system of justice. If we do not have a system of justice that people believe in, the system of democracy will fail.
It's tempting to say the Ph.D. didn't have an effect, but it's not so. I think whatever resonance I may be able to achieve is in part simply from the amount of reading and learning that I acquired along the way.
I'm always represented as a bit of a class warrior - a bit Down With Men and Down With Middle-Class People. Whereas I'm actually very fond of men and am middle-class. I even went to boarding school in Perthshire.
Let's do it. Monkeys are always funny. You pretty much can't go wrong with a monkey, right? Hi paused. Well unless that monkey wants you dead, or does needle drugs or something. Then it's wrong, and a bad monkey.
In prose, leaps of logic can be made while the protagonist thinks about things and arrives at conclusions. Even with voiceover, there's no real way of having an inner voice without it taking over the entire story.
I have a strong work ethic, yet I'm incredibly lazy as well. The problem with being a writer is that everything you do can be called research. Sitting in the pub is research. Reading the newspaper can be research.