Suspenseful Quotes & Sayings

My #1 job as a thriller author is to give readers the best white-knuckle thrill ride I am capable of. I am first and foremost in the entertainment business. If that suspenseful ride is also terrifying because it hits really close to home, then I am once again doing what I am supposed to do as a thriller author. — Brad Thor

I can remember the times when I started including humor in novels that were suspenseful. I was told you can't do that because you can't keep the audience in suspense if they're laughing. My attitude was, if the character has a sense of humor, then that makes the character more real because that's how we deal with the vicissitudes of life, we deal with it through humor. — Dean Koontz

I always set out to tell a good story, to create a character that young people can relate to, place them in a situation that will be interesting, intriguing, eventually suspenseful. But what I find is that after I do that, then there are themes that emerge, which teachers can then use to provoke discussion and debate. — Lois Lowry

I really like suspenseful movies and movies that make you think. — A. J. Cook

Even though I don't necessarily believe in everything that's supernatural, I like being scared and I like things that are suspenseful. — Gemma Chan

A shivery, delicious Southern Gothic with feuding families, dark spirits, ancient curses and caught up in the middle, a young girl learning to live and love for the first time. Atmospheric and suspenseful, Compulsion will draw you in and hold you until the very last page. — Leah Cypess

The God Factor Saga is a complex blockbuster in genre of This Present Darkness meets Anne of Green Gables. This saga is a romantic, suspenseful, apocalyptic, and inspirational novel tucked into the stories of children who grow up to be men and women with Divine purpose. — J. Nell Brown

Seduction is an absolute pleasure to read
clever, suspenseful, exciting, mysterious, learned, and engrossing. Some of the best historical fiction I've read in quite some time and just plain reading fun. M.J. Rose is at the top of her game, and that is saying something. — David Liss

To me, romance and suspense go hand in hand. What's more suspenseful than wondering how two wonderful people can manage to get together in spite of the world going crazy around them? — Maggie Shayne

Tides is a rich, taut, suspenseful, and funny exploration of two worlds, selkie and human. It's full of mystery but it's also so fully imagined that a reader can jump right in. Betsy Cornwell is a terrific new talent with a boundless imagination. — Valerie Sayers

In How to Be an American Housewife Margaret Dilloway creates an irresistible heroine. Shoko is stubborn, contrary, proud, a wonderful housewife and full of deeply conflicted feelings. I wanted to shake her, even as I was cheering her on, and this cunningly structured novel allowed me to do both. It also took me on two intricate journeys, from post-war Japan and the shadow of Nagasaki to contemporary California, and from motherhood to daughterhood and back again. A profound and suspenseful debut. — Margot Livesey

You make faces when you read, you know. I can always tell when you're reading something happy or suspenseful, or upsetting. Your face shows everything ... whenever you read, it's all reflected there in your face. Like that time you came over, and Andrew was busy studying, so you read In Cold Blood. You were grimacing and flinching through the whole book, as though it was happening personally to you. — Alicia Thompson

I certainly remember building model rockets. It was fun to watch the rocket blast into the air, suspenseful to wonder if the parachute would open to bring the rocket safely back. — Eric Allin Cornell

Oh no he does not! He does NOT read James Freaking Patterson. Our salvation - our provider ... we must be out of our minds.
I happen to find Patterson thought provoking and suspenseful.
You what? Did you just say you find James Patterson thought provoking and suspenseful? Jesus Christ open your eyes! Are you so desperate to believe that you're defending James Patterson?! — Shalom Auslander

Live in your dreams, not your past. — Curt Rude

Vividly imagined, beautifully written, at times almost unbearably suspenseful-the stories in Kristiana Kahakauwila's debut collection, This Is Paradise, are boldly inventive in their exploration of the tenuous nature of human relations. These are poignant stories of 'paradise'-Hawai'i-with all that 'paradise' entails of the transience of sensuous beauty. — Joyce Carol Oates

The inexorable search for a stanza of meaning hangs like a thundercloud over the troposphere of humankind's prosaic existence. A dithering sense of loss engulfs us. Humankind's unattainable desire to achieve a slice of perfection generates a suspenseful haze of doom. A lingering stab of incompleteness coupled with the tantalizing riddles of fate are inalterably interlinked and imbued in all thinking people's tormented soul. This cross coalescence of unattainable longing melds with the mystic tinged edges of uncertainty, spawned by the unanswerable questions posed by fate, fomenting a dialectical dissonance that distinguishes and ultimately exemplifies the arc of humankind's plaintive subsistence. — Kilroy J. Oldster

As an editor, I read Charlotte Rogan's amazing debut novel, 'The Lifeboat,' when it was still in manuscript. I read it in one night, and I really wanted my company to publish it, but we lost it to another house. It's such a wonderful combination of beautiful writing and suspenseful storytelling. — Karen Thompson Walker

'Gossip Girl' came out in rapid succession over two years, so the endings always had to be suspenseful so that you couldn't wait for the next one. — Cecily Von Ziegesar

I don't stay in the genre because I just like all stories that have a smart hook in them and I can find a comic way through if it's a comedy or a suspenseful way through it if it's a drama. — Jay Roach

Is it possible for g.r to put the g.r page back into my computer because I lost the data. — Vincent Collins

I like films that are gritty and hard-hitting and suspenseful. Thrillers, too. — Domhnall Gleeson

Perhaps because my town was so naturally gothic in its architecture and relative isolation - the roads often closed in winter - my stories tended toward the ghostly and the creepily suspenseful right from the get-go. — Andrew Pyper

I think so, Silence of the Lambs was a great, suspenseful thriller and I would expect Red Dragon to be similar. And I think it's very character driven. — Emily Watson

Three characteristics a work of fiction must possess in order to be successful:
1. It must have a precise and suspenseful plot.
2. The author must feel a passionate urge to write it.
3. He must have the conviction, or at least the illusion, that he is the only one who can handle this particular theme. — Isaac Bashevis Singer

Touch not the fighting-dog without a glove.
Give me a fighting-dog and I come alive.
Fighting-dogs always meant more to Tom Mitchell than people. — John Duncan

Death is an absolute mystery. We are all vulnerable to it, it's what makes life interesting and suspenseful. — Jeanne Moreau

I closed my eyes, but that didn't blur the images his words had evoked. "Oh, God," I murmured.
"God," he said, "had nothing to do with it at all. — Jeannette De Beauvoir

I think suspense should be like any other color on a writer's palette. I suppose I'm in the minority but I think it's crazy for 'literary fiction' to divorce itself from stories that are suspenseful, and assign anything with cops or spies or criminals to some genre ghetto. — Jess Walter

If this was The Lord of the Rings and I had a smart British voice like Cate Blanchett, I could tell you the background of the events of that fall in a really suspenseful way. And you'd be straining to hear the rest. — Charlaine Harris

When society involves the anarch in a conflict which in which he does not participate inwardly, it challenges him to launch an opposition. He will try to turn the lever with which society moves him. Society is then at his disposal, say, as a stage for grand spectacles that are devised for him. Everything changes; the fetter becomes fascinating, danger an adventure, a suspenseful task. — Ernst Junger

The magic in writing is not so much using your imagination as it is allowing the reader to uses theirs. When I write a novel I'm not going to hand walk you through each scene. Avid readers tend to have very high IQ's so I'm constantly aware of, and respect that. I have a tendency to give my readers vivid descriptions of panoramic viewpoints, soft breezes, and the late evening as it scrapes against the emerging night and present this step by suspenseful step. Once I get them to the threshold of that unseen cliff, I shove them off and say, take it from there. — Carl Henegan

I'm a guy who likes to watch something cool, creepy and suspenseful and there is no show to watch as an adult that would scare me at for even four seconds. — Todd McFarlane

But suspense presupposes uncertainty. No matter how nightmarish the situation, real suspense is impossible when we know in advance that the protagonist will prevail (as we would if Woolrich had used series characters) or will be destroyed. This is why, despite his congenital pessimism, Woolrich manages any number of times to squeeze out an upbeat resolution. Precisely because we can never know whether a particular novel or story will be light or dark, allegre or noir, his work remains hauntingly suspenseful.
("Introduction") — Francis M. Nevins Jr.

You notice Mr. Hollywood noticing you at the auction this morning? Because I did. I also noticed you noticing him. — Jessica R. Patch

Skye's footsteps are growing louder now. And the closer I get to her, the faster I walk, and the lighter I feel. My throat begins to relax. Two steps behind her, I say her name. "Skye".
-Such a suspenseful end to the book. I was correct, the reason why Hannah created the tapes were because she although no one tried hard enough for her.. hopefully with the tapes someone ill learn to care and try hard for someone who seems to carry herself the way Hannah once did. I like how it says that Skye's foot steps are getting louder because its really symoblizing how her steps are louder because someone acknowledges her steps, someone acknowledges her attitude and the way she carries herself.. just like Hannah did when she was alive. — Jay Asher

No use lamenting over it! I was now living in a blaze of unsatisfied desire, of suspenseful expectancy, that often made me wild and crazy. I often saw the image of my dream beloved before me with more than lifelike clarity, much more clearly than my own hand; I spoke to it, wept before it, cursed it. I called it mother and knelt before it in tears; I called it beloved and sensed its ripe, all-fulfilling kiss; I called it devil and whore, vampire and murderess. It lured me into the tenderest dreams of love and into acts of dissolute shamelessness; nothing was too good and precious for it, nothing too bad and vile. — Hermann Hesse

Nothing is less suspenseful than a threat that threatens the maker of the threat at least as much as the subject of the threat. Congress hasn't learned this yet, but America has learned it over and over. — Walter Kirn

We have a slate of four films. From Karen Young - the USA bestselling author - we have Blood Bayou. Again, we're relying on the story to tell itself and the characters tell it and not (relying on) shock value. It's a suspenseful drama ... The best way I can describe it is Pelican Brief meets Time to Kill. — Drew Waters

Cherry Money Baby is fabulous in every sense of the word! It's earthy and smart and moving, laugh-out-loud funny, surprising, inventive, suspenseful, and - Oh, Hell - just gorgeously written! — Tim Wynne-Jones

I have never read horror, nor do I consider The Exorcist to be such, but rather as a suspenseful supernatural detective story, or paranormal police procedural. — William Peter Blatty

If the film isn't suspenseful, i.e. the pressure cooker situation of what's going on in the movie, if that's not part of it, if the threat of violence and the temperature isn't always going up a notch every scene or so, then the movie is going to be boring. It's not going to work. — Quentin Tarantino