Famous Quotes & Sayings

Agatha Christie

It's what's in *yourself* that makes you happy or unhappy.

Donald Ray Pollock

Michael Koryta is an amazingly talented writer, and I rank The Prophet as one of the sharpest and superbly plotted crime novels I've read in my life.

James Ellroy

I am a master of fiction. I am also the greatest crime novelist who ever lived. I am to the crime novel in specific what Tolstoy is to the Russian novel and what Beethoven is to music.

Michael Koryta

Horror and supernatural novels give you a lot of what you look for in a crime novel, just with a twist that was very fresh for me as a reader.

Megan Abbott

I don't really consider any of my novels 'crime' novels.

Noah Baumbach

I'm good with a grill. I like to make cheeseburgers - I once read in a David Goodis crime novel that you're only supposed to flip a burger once.

Michael Connelly

The best crime novels are not about how a detective works on a case; they are about how a case works on a detective.

Kate Mosse

I read a lot of thrillers, especially American crime novels.

Jo Nesbo

Ever since the '70s, Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo were the godfathers of Scandinavian crime. They broke the crime novel in Scandinavia from the kiosks and into the serious bookstores.

David Mitchell

I'm a novelist, that's how I make my livelihood, and I concentrate on the novels.

Jane Smiley

A novelist is on the cusp between someone who knows everything and someone who knows nothing.

Jane Smiley

Novelists never have to footnote.

Beth Henley

But here's the thing: what you do as a screenwriter is you sell your copyright. As a novelist, as a poet, as a playwright, you maintain your copyright

Dean Koontz

Not all popular novelists are good, but all good novelists are, sooner or later, popular.

Billy Bob Thornton

I'm more influenced by novelists than I am by filmmakers.

Ray Bradbury

In Hollywood, they think they know it all. You, as a writer, are essentially an outsider. Novelists and short-story writers, especially.

Kurt Vonnegut

I think I belong to America's last generation of novelists. Novelists will come one by one from now on, not in seeming families, and will perhaps write only one or two novels, and let it go at that.

Orhan Pamuk

I think novelists should be disciplined and self-imposed working hours. I work a lot, but I don't feel that I'm working. I always feel that there is a child in me, healthy, and I'm playing.

Charles Stross

I don't do flash fiction.

Anita Diament

When I turned 40, I wanted to do something different. Fiction offered a different challenge. It uses a different side of the brain.

Tahmoh Penikett

I love science fiction when it's well-done. I don't like campy stuff. I don't like stuff that's too fantastical.

Tom Bissell

My fiction-writing DNA shows in how I think about prose, how I think about the page, how I think nonfiction stories should work. And every piece of nonfiction I write, I want it to have fictional texture.

Laurie Levenson

The popularity of these programs has an impact. There is a blurring of fiction and reality.

Brent Spiner

I don't read fiction at all.

David Morrell

There are no inferior types of fiction, only inferior practitioners of them.

David Mitchell

Implausible truth can serve one better than plausible fiction

Chad Harbach

Fiction and nonfiction, for me, involve very different processes.