Zal Batmanglij Quotes

That's what everyone said attracted them to Lantana - I call it an adult mystery, because it's not a thriller in the sense of that other way, but it is a mystery.

I've been in an Agatha Christie called 'The Sittaford Mystery,' which I enjoyed, but 'The Pale Horse' has a real sense of intrigue and the jigsaw pieces fitting together.

'Drive' is a genre piece, and a lot of times we don't get really sophisticated genre films.

I love so many different genres. I love crime films - and unusual coming-of-age pieces.

People love a good mystery; I understand that.

Mysteries and thrillers are not the same things, though they are literary siblings. Roughly put, I would say the distinction is that mysteries emphasize motive and psychology whereas thrillers rely more heavily on action and plot.

I don't like to go to the movies to see violence or some kind of spy thing with all kinds of information you have to assimilate to understand the plot.

I was so obsessed by Lisbeth Salander and all the characters, but of course if you're going to write a crime novel worthy of Stieg Larsson, you need a plot, don't you?

I know nothing about mysteries. I don't take to them.

There is nothing better than a really cool mystery: you don't know what's going to happen, so you keep turning those pages or watching that series.

A lot of the stories I write about have an element of mystery. They're crime stories or conspiracy stories or quests. They do have built into them revelations and twists. But the revelations, to me, come from seeing history as it's unfolding, or life as it's unfolding.

One of the things that I love about crime novels is that you can turn the volume all the way up. If I can make somebody blow their subway stop, I win.

There's this film called 'The Pledge', with Jack Nicholson in it. Now that's a dark film.

I think 'The Condemned' has a great story. It's a lot more than a mindless action flick.

My focus will always be crime, but it might not always be fiction, nor always for adults, nor books entirely in prose. That's a lot of ground to cover, so I might as well begin.

Has all the trappings of a mystery novel, doesn't it?

The cinema, like the detective story, makes it possible to experience without danger all the excitement, passion and desirousness which must be repressed in a humanitarian ordering of life.

What attracted me to 'The Maze Runner' is its pure action.

Even with 'Three Days of the Condor,' I wanted to do a thriller. But I was still concentrating on the Faye Dunaway-Robert Redford relationship in that film.

I love crime, I love mysteries, and I love ghosts.

When you're making a psychological thriller, what you need to do is have an audience on shifting sand so they're never quite sure where they are.

Charles McCarry is the best modern writer on the subject of intrigue - by the breadth of Alan Furst, by the fathom of Eric Ambler, by any measure.

Because I read so much nonfiction for work, I enjoy fiction most, especially detective novels and mysteries that keep me awake at night.

The first time I read a crime novel - I think it may have been an Elmore Leonard book - it took some time for me to realise how the genre worked. There were about 20 characters on the first page, and I wasn't used to this. I started to enjoy it when I saw that was how crime books worked.

Like, literally, when you get the script, you're like, 'Whoa, I hope the Black Hood isn't after me.' I guess we'll find out.