Thriller Writers Quotes & Sayings

because the belief system has no doubt led to success in the past, so it will fight back with many varieties of self-fulfilling prophecies. — Mary Poppendieck

That's part of provin' you got sass, lettin' us know how he is when he's in action. But, I'm warning you now, I don't do too much information. Just enough to confirm he's not only hot on the outside but he's also got the moves. I can't function around a man if I know his ability to give pleasure. I stared at her and I was pretty sure my mouth was open. — Kristen Ashley

I curl up, make myself smaller, try to disappear entirely. Wrapped in silence, I slide my bracelet that reads 'mentally disoriented' around and around my wrist. — Suzanne Collins

The object of learning was not to build a better mousetrap but to ask a better question. — Julius Lester

God works in mysterious ways. Sometimes he uses anonymous people. — Khaled Talib

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

Movies have influenced all writers, not just thriller writers. — Ken Follett

Whatever country you live in, any law based on "glory" instead of real harm is dangerous. The glory of the nation, or the glory of the monarchy, or the glory of the superior race, or the glory of the church have been the cause of horrible wars and legally sanctioned discrimination. Any laws based solely on these glories should be morally denounced. They cause unnecessary harm. — Dan Barker

You're not supposed to dislike your own child. You were supposed to like them no matter what, even if they were not what you wanted. — J.K. Rowling

I think that I am profoundly influenced by writers who have explored loss, and longing, and fear. Those influences have turned me into a thriller writer, essentially. — Christopher Rice

Writers are alphabet artists. The blank page becomes their canvas as they paint pictures with words. — Barbara Case Speers

It is not for us to judge those who might be confused or who have not the strength to change. What they need is our understanding and support. — Hans B. Ringger

An awful lot of thriller writers write women rather badly. So just doing it OK gets a lot of credit. — Ken Follett

It is the studying that you do after your school days that really counts. Otherwise, you know only that which everyone else knows. — Henry Latham Doherty

Woolrich had a genius for creating types of story perfectly consonant with his world: the noir cop story, the clock race story, the waking nightmare, the oscillation thriller, the headlong through the night story, the annihilation story, the last hours story. These situations, and variations on them, and others like them, are paradigms of our position in the world as Woolrich sees it. His mastery of suspense, his genius (like that of his spiritual brother Alfred Hitchcock) for keeping us on the edge of our seats and gasping with fright, stems not only from the nightmarish situations he conjured up but from his prose, which is compulsively readable, cinematically vivid, high-strung almost to the point of hysteria, forcing us into the skins of the hunted and doomed where we live their agonies and die with them a thousand small deaths. — Francis M. Nevins Jr.

I think mystery writers and thriller writers - whatever genre you want to call it - are taking on some of the biggest, most interesting kind of socioeconomic issues around in a really interesting, compelling way. — Gillian Flynn

You never know what you're getting into when you stick your nose in other people's rubbish. — Alan Bradley

I'd hate to meet one of those thriller writers in person. — Blake Crouch

Indecisiveness wears a person out. — E.L. Konigsburg

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

Veterans and remarkable rookies. International Thriller Writers, Inc. (ITW) cofounder, David — Lee Child

Many girls do not go to school because of poverty. — Malala Yousafzai

I fear horror became so inextricably related to splatter punk in the late 1980s that a large segment of the audience turned away from it. And thriller became the more comfortable, cozier label because it promised a resolution, a happy ending. Horror came to mean, I'm going to leave your ass out here in the dark with no way to get home. And one of your legs is missing. — Christopher Rice

The man driving wears a hat, a beard, and a smile. — Veronica Roth

What I love about the thriller form is that it makes you write a story. You can't get lost in your own genius, which is a dangerous place for writers. You don't want to ever get complacent. If a book starts going too well, I usually know there's a problem. I need to struggle. I need that self-doubt. I need to think it's not the best thing ever. — Harlan Coben

Richard subtly slipped in the fact that he is thriller writer Richard Renwick, creator of MI5 hero Jackman Tripp. Unfortunately none of them had ever heard of Richard or his hero, which led to a prickly first day on safari. But now he's back in form, doing what he does best: charming his audience. Laying it on too thick, I think. Far too thick. But if I complain about it later, I know exactly what he'll say. It's what writers have to do, Millie. We have to be sociable and bring in new readers. Funny how Richard never wastes his time being sociable with — Tess Gerritsen

I don't find any real rivalries with crime and thriller writers anyway. That might sound a little Pollyanna, but for the most part the writers I compete with, if you want to use that word, it's a pretty friendly rivalry. I think we all realise that the boat rises and sinks together. — Harlan Coben

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

Thriller writers see a rose colored world through dark tinted glasses. — Carl Henegan

I enjoy a special collegiality among other writers in the thriller community. They call me 'Canada's scariest writer,' and I love that. — Andrew Pyper

Today I'll fix the mistakes I made
yesterday and tomorrow I'll fix the
mistakes I made today — Christian O. Ortiz

I love thriller writers. My favourites are Harlan Coban, Lee Child, Ian Rankin, Kathy Reichs and Ed McBain. — Maeve Binchy

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

There have been cans of dog food more splendiferous than South Richmond. Land mines more tender. — Tom Robbins