Anne Enright Quotes

Suspense is my thing. I think I am able to make people want to keep turning pages. They want to know what happens. So I can do that.

One of the wonderful things about 'Power' and why fans often say it makes their heart race is it's set up like a horror film because the audience is, like, four or five steps ahead of the characters.

A lot of the best suspense operates on a careful withholding of information as opposed to the doling out of information.

Narrative tension is primarily about withholding information.

When the reader and one narrator know something the other narrator does not, the opportunities for suspense and plot development and the shifting of reader sympathies get really interesting.

The thing I loved about Alfred Hitchcock is that he left a lot of open ends there, a lot of clues that didn't really add up the way you think they would, and sometimes, not at all.

The way to write a thriller is to ask a question at the beginning, and answer it at the end.

I want to make it so that so many things happen... that you didn't expect would happen in this series, that you realize that you have to read every one of them.

If 'The Blacklist' taught me anything, it was kind of open-ended intrigue and leaving questions unanswered. Creating this kind of mystery by virtue of depriving the audience of these easy answers was what I was kind of into.

Maybe 'Doonby' will haunt people for awhile and make them wonder, 'What was that really about?' And that excites me as an artist.

In 'Lost,' they really believed in the mystery box and not looking too much inside the mystery box. It was some kind of idea generator that you didn't need to dissect and open up. And that's absolutely fascinating and an engaging way to tell a story.

I always find with dramas that the more that's left to the imagination of the audience, the better.

Of course, I'm being rude. I'm spoiling the ending, not only of the entire book, but of this particular piece of it. I have given you two events in advance, because I don't have much interest in building mystery. Mystery bores me. It chores me. I know what happens and so do you. It's the machinations that wheel us there that aggravate, perplex, interest, and astound me. There are many things to think of. There is much story.

As a reader, I do not like to have everything handed to me. Because after a while it gets formulaic and I'm thinking, "If this is so thought through, then why do I need to read it. It's done!" It becomes a beach book at a certain point.

Having the audience know more than the characters is precisely where you want to be in terms of drama. You can engage them much more when that is the case.

What's going on?" I sat down on the bed and finished the last of the scone. "Bad things," she said mischievously. "You'll approve.

I think there's something so attractive about mystery.

If I really knew how to do good storytelling, I would be a writer. Mystery is not a huge part of it. ... It's tension, it's relationships. I think it's a struggle.

You can write something that has continuity, but it makes happy endings all the more ridiculous.

I love not knowing. It keeps me guessing.

We can't say anything, but just remember that, on Fringe, nothing is as it seems. There's always a little more to the story behind the story. He's definitely a large part, going forward. A lot of things will come full circle.

Suspense is one of the ways you persuade a reader to become engaged and stay engaged with your work.

he's a story i want to know from page one

I think a little menace is fine to have in a story. For one thing, it's good for the circulation.

The world is a play that would not be worth seeing if we knew the plot.