William Peter Blatty Quotes

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.

The crime genre's always been regarded very well by the literary end of the book world, whereas horror, although it had that spell in the late eighties, by and large, it's sort of ghetto-ized, and considered to be exploited literature.

I have been reading Stephen King since CARRIE and hope to read him for many years to come.

I do try not to spend much time reading in the suspense genre.

I read the final Wallander novel, 'The Troubled Man,' not long after it was published.

The cliches are that it's the most generic Starsky and Hutch plot you can find.

A conventional crime story is simple - it's just a corpse in the river or something, and a detective with an alcohol problem.

I would love to do something like 'Beverly Hills Cop'. I'd get to be funny and cool and heroic all in the same breath.

I'd love to do a cop film in America. That's a genre I absolutely adore.

You can't beat a cop drama. That's what everybody seems to want to watch.

A mystery is a whodunit. You know what happened, but not how or who's behind it. A thriller, or a suspense, is a howdunit. You know what happened, and you usually know who did it, but you keep reading because you want to know how they pulled it off.

I have only read very classic traditional English ghost stories, other than Henry James, who wrote some magnificent short ones as well as the longer 'Turn of the Screw.' He, Dickens, and M.R. James are my influences.

What was always interesting about Thomas Harris' books is they were a wonderful hybridization of a crime thriller and a horror movie.

I've been typed as historical fiction, historical women's fiction, historical mystery, historical chick lit, historical romance - all for the same book.

I think it's pretty apparent who my favorites are because I keep coming back to them. At the top of that list would be Harry Bosch, who's now going on 20 years of literary life. I still like him the best because there's still a lot to say about him.

The vampire story is something that has existed since 'Nosferatu,' and I don't think it's gonna go away.

With 'The Exorcist,' a lot of things went into it. I hadn't seen the show until they asked me, and then I checked the show out and thought it was very well done.

I liked the idea of a whodunit revolving around a marriage.

I don't want people reading my books just because they're horror or mysteries. I want them to read them because they're Joe Lansdale books.

I've been a fan of horror and studying it for as long as I can remember.

'Law & Order' is a dream come true. I grew up watching it! I always wanted to portray a character on the show because it's always so riveting.

A couple of my favourite cop movies are 'I Love a Man in Uniform' and 'The Long Goodbye.'

Writing books that people want to read is helpful - my most successful book is my only police procedural, a very popular subgenre of the very popular crime fiction genre.

Joseph Wambaugh did not invent the police novel, but no one had seen anything like 'The New Centurions' when it was published in 1971. Here was a working, living, breathing cop with a decade of experience on the beat.

After college, I went on a real big classics kick. Read everything by Faulkner, Hemingway, Woolf, Proust, Dostoevsky. And that classics train dropped me off at 'Dracula.' Halfway through it, I understood I'd never be going back, never 'leaving' the genre again. Since then, I've been on a fairly strict horror diet.