Thriller Novel Quotes & Sayings

The last vestiges of consciousness tell her she has just witnessed her own murder, all she ever was and hoped to be is gone. — Terry Hayes

He was pushing fifty, with a face life had chewed on, and long wisps of graying hair parted low on one side and combed over his balding pate. — Patricia Cornwell

Doing crime films ... maybe it's to some extent a matter of taste. Certainly my first novel had a criminal element and was about the similarity of criminals and artists. Pretextually, it was sort of a money bag thriller. But it was aggressively not what it seemed to be. It was kind of Duchamps. — William Monahan

You may be done with the past, but the past may not be done with you. — Jennifer Dwight

Do not judge a book by its price! — Claire Hamelin Manning

I don't care what Einstein said about God not playing dice; If he exists, he's addicted to craps. — Henry Mosquera

The two smallest boys were cut down first, bodies bounding in different directions as they were shot from opposite sides of the field, like pinballs caught in a tight corner. — Cole Alpaugh

No Way Back is my kind of novel - a tough, taut thriller - Mofina knows the world he writes about. — Michael Connelly

The characters you refer to as predatory and unsavory are useful. They're the ones who make a novel into a thriller. They're active, and most of the common virtues, the signs of a good person, are not. — Thomas Perry

It's getting a little chilly in here! Why don't we sit by the fireplace and I'll tell you the story of how I single handedly killed the Medina boys! — Angel Ramon Medina

In near panic, I craned my neck to gaze over the cabin's roofline a bursting fireball. — Ed Lynskey

The best way of keeping a low profile was to immerse himself in the mundane. Act like them, talk like them. A smile, a joke was all it took - at least during the day. The night was his own. — Caroline Mitchell

Henri-Georges Clouzot's cool, clammy, twisty 1955 thriller Diabolique is an almost perfect movie about a very nearly perfect murder, a film in which the artist's methods and the killers' are ideally matched, equal in cunning and in ruthlessness. The screenplay, adapted by Clouzot and three other writers from a novel by the crack French crime-fiction team of Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, is a fantastically elaborate piece of contrivance, but the scrupulous realism of the direction makes the unnatural tale somehow feel entirely likely. — Terrence Rafferty

From Flood, Flash, and Pheromones
coming soon:
In the torrential downpour with water swirling that threatened to pull her down, she didn't see the voice's owner. The hurricane had blessed the entire city with a surprise drenching. All weather reports had predicted it to pass over with sporadic rainfall but that didn't happen. The storm settled over Houston as if it had no intention to move on. Cassie flailed in panic as the roof of her car disappeared under the water twenty feet beyond. She prayed once more that the container in it was watertight. And that she'd see her car again. Then she concentrated on living. Where had the voice come from? — Shelley K. Wall

Surprised huh, thought you had me back in prison didn't you? To answer your question what keeps me alive is my drive, my drive to kill you! I have nothing, but hate for you and your family. It will be my pleasure taking you out. I don't care about power, plutonium or even being rich. None of that matters to me. I only care about taking you out. Even if I die I want to be the one who is called the killer of Angel Medina! There's no where for you to go. Now we will truly see who is better! Come on put up you hands and prepare for your final battle of your life! - Orlando from Framed: The Second Book of the Thousand Years War — Angel Ramon Medina

Having written for film and television, I had little interest in turning 'The Good Father' into a Hollywood thriller. I was writing a novel, and novels demand that the writer goes deeper, both emotionally and thematically. — Noah Hawley

The techno-political thriller and the romance novel serve as antidotes to the imagination rather than stimulants to it. For this reason they make for ideal reading in airports and airplanes. They effectively shut down the imagination by doing all its work for it. They leave the spirit or the soul - and ambiguity, for that matter - out of the equation. By shutting down the imagination, genre novels perform a useful service to the anxious air traveler by reducing his or her ability to speculate. For the most part, people on airplanes, and here I include myself, would rather not use their speculative imaginations at all; one consequence of this situation is that great poetry is virtually unreadable during turbulence, when the snack cart has been put away and the seat belts fastened. Enough anxiety is associated with air travel without Rainer Maria Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus making it worse. — Charles Baxter

If I am going to be a monster, the least I could do is be well fed! — Cristina M. Sburlea

I had access to excerpts to the original version of Per Fine Ounce which were provided to us by David Jenkins, the son of Geoffrey Jenkins, with his consent to write another South Africa thriller using Commander Geoffrey Peace as the main character, and using the same title Per Fine Ounce. David kindly gave us permission to include previously unpublished extracts from the original Bond novel as a front piece for my novel. — Peter Vollmer

People have incredible nerve to do terrible things, but never actually admit to them. — Henry Mosquera

When I started writing the third book, 'The Kill,' the intention was just to write a thriller, a crime novel for myself, really, in which there would be no body, no solution - where you would look at an event from different people's perspectives. — Richard House

Truth is irrelevant; what matters is what people believe. — Henry Mosquera

What could there be in this document written by a young girl in 1917? — Peter J. Tanous

The word "can't" should be erased from the dictionary. It is an excuse for I don't want to even try. — J.M. Brown

Many Scandinavian writers who had made their name in literary fiction felt they wanted to have a go at the crime novel to show they could compete with the best. If Salman Rushdie had been Norwegian, he would definitely have written at least one thriller. — Jo Nesbo

I look at you, Mrs. Emily. I see your eyes smile before your lips. Your hair has a curl that droops onto your forehead when the weather is humid . . .

I look at you too, Sabine. I see you. — Phyllis H. Moore

I just wanted to buy a spy novel. I didn't want to be in one. — Jeffrey Westhoff

Any self-defense class worth its salt will tell you that
you don't pull out a weapon unless you intend to use it.
The same should apply to ballsy remarks. — Henry Mosquera

Limp finally spoke. Do you think you could kill a person and not get all crazy about it? — Cole Alpaugh

I think all artists struggle to represent the geometry
of life in their own way, just like writers deal with
archetypes. There are only so many stories that you can
tell, but an infinite number of storytellers. — Henry Mosquera

WEST SALEM ~ October 2011
A sudden vision, fraught with malevolence and darkness, obscured her sight. The face of a menacing figure turned from the shadows of his grisly handiwork and stared at Sorcha.
Her muscles tensed. By the Goddess, could he see her?
Please! No!
She wanted to scream, to run, but the vision ensnared her into the horrific moment like a fly in a spider's web. — Cherie De Sues

Some people like the Jews, and some do not. But no thoughtful man can deny the fact that they are, beyond any question, the most formidable and most remarkable race which has appeared in the world.
- Winston S. Churchill — Ellen Brazer

I've always said women are vicious creatures - Detective Zach Grimes — Lauren Bradshaw

If your like a powerful modern thriller with an historical core in the Scandinavian style of many separate threads which eventually come together, Purple Killing will grip you. It is my latest book and a companion to Hitler's First Lady, but in a very different style. Set equally in the US and UK. — Malcolm Blair-Robinson

How the Hell is it we go to pick up Jenna Jameson and end up with the fucking chick from those Kill Bill movies? — Todd Morr

Out in the field, any connection with home just makes you weaker. It reminds you that you were once civilized, soft; and that can get you killed faster than a bullet through the head. — Henry Mosquera

I didn't know that once you've proven yourself useful to the wrong people, you'll never be free again. — Steve Hamilton

Sometimes everything in one's life must fall apart. — Jennifer Dwight

Blurring the line between possible and impossible, linear and non-linear time, fiction and reality, fate and free will, 1Q84 is both a metaphysical mind-teaser and a fast-paced thriller where the stakes for Tengo and Aomame couldn't be any higher. Murakami's most ambitious novel to date, 1Q84 is also an extraordinary love story, a story about the power of a single moment of deep connection to transcend time and space - and justify even the greatest of risks. — Haruki Murakami

The dedication of Don Winslow's novel 'The Cartel' is nearly two pages long: a list of journalists who were either murdered or 'disappeared' in Mexico between 2004 and 2012 - the period covered in this hugely hypnotic new thriller. — Alan Cheuse

In a short story by Chekhov or a novel by Balzac he found mysteries which, so far as he was aware, did not exist in any spy thriller. 35 — Amos Oz

But now we live in a time and in a culture when mystery tends to mean something more answerable, it means a crime novel, a thriller, a drama on TV, usually one where we'll find out - and where the whole point of reading it or watching it will be that we will find out - what happened. — Ali Smith

I've learned that the most unbelievable is the most believable. — H.C. Deboard

Havens turned again.
Someone else passed between the trucks.
That someone walked with less purpose than the other workers near the stalls. To Havens this meant a surveillance asset was on him and it probably was not an assassination attempt. It eased him back into relative comfort for just a moment or two more. — J.T. Patten

I don't mind my friends calling me "Thornes," but the fact of people calling me "Prickly Thornes" draws the line. — Simi Sunny

I will not be a victim. I will not think like a victim. I am going to avenge all those little girls. I am going to win. — Carolyn Lee Adams

Writing the middle of a novel is a lot like driving through Texas. You think it's never going to end, and the scenery looks the same. — Carolyn Wheat

Kinda ' makes it hard to be a super hero when you ain't got nothin' to work wit', ain't it? — Randolph Randy Camp

Where's the sun? Sometimes I never see the sun. — Randolph Randy Camp

James Buchan's The Persian Bride combines a moving love story, a political thriller, and a history of modern Iran in a beautiful novel about the relationship of two people caught up in the Iranian revolution: John Pitt, a young man from England who arrives in Isfahan, Iran, in 1974, and seventeen-year-old Shirin, one of John's students, whose father is a general in the shah's army. — Nancy Pearl

I define a thriller as a big-stakes, multiple-viewpoint novel involving suspense, action, and mystery, in which the reader doesn't know everything but usually knows more than any single character. — F. Paul Wilson

Dead. Supposedly Suicide. That's how they'll kill Michael too. Make it look like a suicide or an accident of some sort. — H.C. Deboard

My vengeance was of a different kind. It bore no offense and no ill towards injustice. It had no emotion. Blood and Death. That's all it was." - Celeste- ALL LIGHT WILL FALL — Almney King

To write a novel is to dream while awake, then express the dream to the reader in an absorbing way. The road leading from the writer's inner world to the readers' is paved with prose. — Alan Joshua

Just the night before, a puma's howl had set a chill at my spine and, man, life didn't get any richer than that. — Ed Lynskey

I am who I am and always shall be. — Laura Elizabeth

The men were smashing windows and aiming their weapons through them. The driver had opened the door and was shouting for the women and children to get out and run and hide. But Ilina realized in some vague way that he never managed to actually say the word "hide." He really said, "Women and children, get out, get out, get out! Run and ... " The clerk's wife thought it was odd that he had stopped in the middle of a sentence, and even stranger that she herself knew the word, heard the word "hide" in her head when the driver stopped talking. — Clark Zlotchew

I had an idea for a medical conspiracy thriller. Since it was non-horror, I didn't want the publishers and editors bringing a lot of baggage - my history as a genre writer in the SF and horror fields, for instance - to the novel when they read it. I wanted them to consider the book solely on its own merits. So I called myself Colin Andrews. I was tired of seeing my books at floor level. Not that Herman Wouk and Phyllis Whitney and William Wharton are bad company, but I wanted to be up at eye level for a change, where people with bad backs could get a chance to see my books. — F. Paul Wilson

What to do? Fight it or play along? Was God behind it? — Peter J. Tanous

Anybody who sits down to write, and they think 'thriller,' maybe shouldn't be thinking that way. Maybe we should be thinking 'novel,' maybe 'thriller' way in the background, but that these are real people to whom things are happening. It just happens to be a hell of an exciting story. — David Morrell

Big results require big ambitions. ~ Heraclitus — B.L. Norris

Yet if he had been asked ... if he were happy ... He would have admitted readily enough that he was uncomfortable, that he was cold, and badly fed, and venomous; that his clothes were in rags, and his feet and knees and elbows raw and bleeding through much walking and crawling; that he was in ever-present peril of life, and that he really did not expect to survive the adventure he was about to thrust himself into voluntarily, but all this had nothing to do with happiness: that was something he never stopped to think about. — C.S. Forester

Regress towards progress - Dr Wannamaker — Lauren Bradshaw

Underneath the ground
you can't hear a sound
not even the sweet falling rain
you might forget about tomorrow
forget about the swallows
but they won't forget you
they won't forget you — Karl P.T. Walsh

Dellosso's cleverly plotted second Jed Patrick novel (after 2015's Centralia) finds the Afghan war vet hiding with his wife, Karen, and their eight-year-old daughter, Lilly, in a cabin in the Idaho wilderness. Two months earlier, two CIA agents gave him a thumb drive containing "every damaging piece of information about the Centralia Project," the exposure of which threatens to cause a "scandal that would be talked and read about for decades to come." Then one day Jed returns to the cabin to find Karen in tears. She tells him that three armed men burst into the cabin asking for the thumb drive, but she didn't know where it was. The men took Lilly, and vowed they would return for Karen. More shocks follow. Meanwhile, CIA technician Tiffany Stockton discovers a plot to control Jed's mind in a sophisticated update of The Manchurian Candidate. Can she stop him from becomes an unwilling assassin? Dellosso expertly misdirects readers, but they should be prepared for only serviceable prose. — Publishers Weekly

Dreema and you disagree. She cottons to Richmond, but you can't be weaned off Pelham. So I offer you a fair middle ground: relocate to northern Virginia. She transfers to the state morgue on Braddock Road, and you get to stay near your old beat. — Ed Lynskey

Love is precious, and shouldn't be wasted on every passing whim, or it will mean nothing by the time you truly wish to share it with someone who matters." I said softly.

Silvers, Shayne (2012-10-08). Obsidian Son: A Novel In The Nate Temple Supernatural Thriller Series (The Temple Chronicles Book 1) (p. 194). Argento Publishing. Kindle Edition. — Shayne Silvers

Red glowing eyes... No one could see her. No one could hear her. No one was coming to save her. Because Death had come sooner than expected. — Humairaa Anseline

And so we continued to live in fear, hoping that we would not get caught. Fear had become our constant companion at this dreadful Lashkar-e-Taiba camp. — Vivek Pereira

Some things are just like riding a bicycle; you jump on, pedal, and hope you don't fall. — Henry Mosquera

When he unleashes on her everything falls together. Like a crick in the neck snapped into place, the boy's brain pops and is put right. It is a beautiful undoing, a beautiful becoming. He doesn't stop to think about it when the punches follow her down to the ground. He doesn't stop to notice when she goes still or when the pool of blood under her head pillows out into a great, liquid heart. He doesn't stop until he's pulled off her and he doesn't start to think again until that night, when he's back at home. For hours and hours his brain stays beautifully popped into place. — Carolyn Lee Adams

Quote taken from Chapter 1:
That's the idea. Listen, Frank, this one is different. She's a keeper." He let that part gel in me. "Get your head screwed on straight and move to Richmond. You hate it living in Pelham. — Ed Lynskey

Truth has a resonance to it that fills the cracks where falsehoods lie. — Rick DeStefanis

R.G. Belsky's thought-provoking thriller, The Kennedy Connection, introduces us to a smart, witty, and human hero whose quest to find answers about two crimes - one famous, one all but unnoticed - is loaded with tension and full of unexpected twists and turns. I loved The Kennedy Connection, and can't wait for the next Gil Malloy novel. — Jan Burke